A number-one on the Billboard R&B chart from 1946. Apparently, this phrase originated in the early 1900s as a racist joke about a slave stealing chickens. An excerpt here from ‘Everybody’s Magazine’ from 1908: A Southerner, hearing a great commotion in his chicken-house one dark night, took his revolver and went to investigate. “Who’s there?” he sternly demanded, open the door. No answer. “Who’s there? Answer, or I’ll shoot!” A trembling voice from the farthest corner: “’Deed, sah, dey ain’t nobody hyah ’ceptin’ us chickens.” So, yeah: pretty racist and awful! In a radio show excerpt that I listened to (https://www.waywordradio.org/us-chickens/), the hosts suggest that by the time it had been turned into a hit song in 1946, it had lost all of that context. I think that’s an awfully convenient assertion for two white people to make over a hundred years later!

Though Donald Trump has made it into a catchphrase, he didn’t come up with the metaphor “drain the swamp.”

From the guy who wrote it.

"These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class. They drove our economy into a ditch. And we got in there and put on our boots and we pushed and we shoved and we were sweating and these guys were standing, watching us, sipping on a Slurpee."

"The NATO phonetic alphabet, more formally the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, is the most widely used spelling alphabet. ... The paramount reason is to ensure intelligibility of voice signals over radio links.

A fantastic blog on Japanese language, literature, and culture. I revel in this. (And this is what a blog should be — written only so often, and every post is high-quality. Comments are few and long and educated and of very high quality themselves.)

"Now, it's very uncool to fall out in someone else's pad."

"A 'beck' is a silent signal, such as a nod of the head or a motion with the forefinger." "In summoning a servant one might have to resort to a 'call' as well as a 'beck' if the servant did not see the beck or failed to respond to it."