by Kevin Burton American farm country has fed the world and supplied it with a number of mud-caked idioms, as we have seen with the help of Merriam-Webster. Today we bring it all home with our third and final installment of Barnyard Idioms. We start with an idiom touching on my job …
Category Archives: language
Flying Pigs And Uncounted Chickens
by Kevin Burton I seem to remember on The Beverly Hillbillies, one or more of the Clampetts describing someone as “muley” to mean they were exceptionally stubborn. Now I see that Merriam-Webster, the dictionary supplying us with idioms from farm country, defines muley as “hornless.” Stay tuned for our second helping of …
Idioms Straight From The Horse’s Mouth
by Kevin Burton Today I am owning my farm-country standing and taking a look at some phrases we have exported to the rest of the country. Merriam-Webster calls them “barnyard idioms.” I don’t love that name but I must admit some of these phrases are more than a little muddy. From Kansas …
Words For Your Wild, Carefree, Summer
by Kevin Burton Summer has not arrived but planning for summer has. Our friends at Merriam-Webster have provided some words that may or may not describe your 2023 getaway(s). Frankly, I would avoid some of these, but that’s up to you: Jaunty adjective: sprightly in manner or appearance. When jaunty first came into English use …
Standing O For Diane Tirado, My Zero Hero
by Kevin Burton At work you shouldn’t expect pay for, and at school you shouldn’t expect credit for, work you didn’t do. I give you that conclusion up front, lest it be lost in this strange little tale. There is weirdness in this story, I warn you. The first strange thing is …
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What’s Stranger Than Fiction, AND Truth?
by Kevin Burton All the cool band names are taken. Trust me. Record label names too. When last we gathered, I spun a fictional account based ever so loosely goosely on a true story. It was about a band called the Palindromes that made it big in Bermuda. The true part of …
Hey Marketers, Watch Your Language
by Kevin Burton The good people at http://www.thoughtco.com have poked into some language-barrier marketing stories and discovered some of them are simply not true. The first one burst my bubble. I heard somewhere that Chevrolet had to stop selling Nova cars in Mexico because “no va” in Spanish means, “it doesn’t go.” …
These Jokes May Drive You To Drink
by Kevin Burton Here’s a tip for you discerning eligible bachelors out there, one you may not have picked up on: Women dig grammar. In the 70s I would have said “chicks dig grammar,” but you never know when somebody, some female somebody, will stumble upon Page 7 for the first time. …
Wobble Talk And Fighting Words In English
by Kevin Burton Here’s one subject that never came up when I was teaching English in Mexico – thank God! In English, when you see the vowel combination “ae” how do you pronounce it? This was brought to my attention on an otherwise glorious Saturday morning by our friends at the Merriam-Webster …
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Looking For A Spark In A Springsteen Song
by Kevin Burton My favorite Bruce Springsteen song was born of irritation and is marinated in frustration. I seem to have slipped into it comfortably, as one might slip into a t-shirt and jeans. Here is how the song came to be, according to SongFacts: “Springsteen wrote it after his manager, …
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