Wordwizard

Ken and James,
Thanks. I'll check it out, for sure. Looks like a good read. Right now I'm heading into a meeting with a "bother of salesmen"

It started out as a simple question. Why do they call a flock of crows a “murder of crows”? I used my best friend but couldn’t find anything in any past threads relating to this topic. After “Googling” for answers, I realized that this peculiar habit of assigning (apparently) unrelated words as coll...

I'd be OK with "Blustery Nor'Wester" as a collective term for North Americans.

Update:
Michael's proctologist just phoned me and it looks like I'm still going to have to walk. Bummer.

Thanks Dale
Pittsburguese for "nowhere in particular". Where was my head going?

Neil How zit goin, eh? I guess in the broader sense we are all North, South or Central Americans. I think your question comes from the fact that ,up here anyway, "American" is used exclusively to refer to someone from "The States" ( I'm not even sure if the term "The States" is OK, anymore). While w...

Is anyone familiar with the phrase "up Mike's"? I'm pretty sure I have a grasp of what it means but I wonder how it started. I heard it said,often,in the "Maritimes"(Canadian for Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and New Brunswick). I suspect it has a UK origin,as that area is heavily influenced by Scottish, Eng...

Curious. I had always thought, without giving it much thought, that the word carried a somewhat criminal slant to it. "Burn" is sometimes used, in my circles,to mean steal. If you go to a peer to peer site and download someone elses material, then copy it to a disc without their permission,you have ...

Wow! 50 points for everyone (almost everyone). Somewhere around the second page, I was beginning to regret having ever stirred this pot. In the end, I wound up with many more answers and a few more questions than I could have wished for. There's so much food for thought that I fear that some of it m...

I think Isaac needed to get out more often.

"Could/couldn't care less" is used interchangeably around here. The split seems to be around 50-50. The explanation I was given was not mentioned in this thread. I'm not surprised. I was talking about this with two friends, both of whom "could" while I "couldn't". The first fella explained. "It's sa...

Hey Wiz
July 1st. It's our birthday. I won't reveal how old we are. Bring beer.

Hand cars were later replaced with the railroad Velocipede ( what a splendid word! I'll be keeping that one in my pocket for later use). It looked like a bicycle that ran on one rail and had a third stabilizing wheel that ran on the opposing rail. Not the old three wheeled bike,again? Perhaps, a lit...

I'm not being a smart ass. We always called them exactly what you described them as. Pumper cars.

Can't help myself. Sometimes I just get a little mushy.