You've probably noticed how work always seems to expand to fill the time given to complete it. But did you know there's a term for that? Also this week, the New England exclamation So don't I!, gray vs. gray, stories in a building, being squiffy, having chops, getting involved in pull-hauls, nubby Pennsylvanians, and a modern Greek idiom about hiccups and burning ears. FULL DETAILSIf you're feeling squiffy, it means you're drunk, especially in 19th century British slang. If someone has a golden gut, on the other hand, it means they have good business acumen. If someone is being nibby or nubby, they're nosy. This Western Pennsylvania http://www.popularpittsburgh.com/pittsburgh-info/pittsburgh-culture/pittsburghese.aspx term goes back to the old Scottish term nib or neb, meaning nose.  What does it mean to have chops? In the 1500s, chops was a slang term for the face or lips, but it carried into African-American jazz culture to mean that a brass or wind player had good embouchure. The idea is reflected in the old jazz musician's saying, "If you ain't got the chops for the dots, ain't nothing' happening." Having chops eventually came to mean having talent in other disciplines as well.The New England phrase So don't I http://www.bu.edu/mfeldman/Boston/wicked.html, meaning you agree, is so embedded in the culture that it's now part of the regional stereotype. Linguist Laurence Horn http://books.google.com/books?id=7ESeXUD10c0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=laurence+horn&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vMG_T5HKLuTw6AGqvcGbCg&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=so%20don't%20I&f=false work has discussed the phenomenon, as have we http://www.waywordradio.org/love-joe-floggers-so-dont-i/ ! Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has an improvement on the hoary puzzle about words ending in gry http://www.snopes.com/language/puzzlers/gry.asp. For example, if someone has posted to Tumblr in a while, they might be feeling a bit bloggry. If you're in the mood to do some karaoke, you might be described as singry. Why are floors of buildings called stories? One theory suggests that an Latin architectural term historia once referred to the stained-glass windows or the ornate statues around the edifice. But the etymology is unclear at best.If someone's been talking about you in English, then metaphorically speaking, your ears must have been burning. If they were talking about you in Modern Greek, it's said that you must have been hiccuping.If you're blowing the soot out, you might literally be clearing the soot out of a flue. By extension, it's a term that means "relieving stress." The term pull-haul, meaning "a verbal conflict," is heard in New England, particularly Maine http://dare.news.wisc.edu/state-by-state/maine/. A 1914 citation in the Dictionary of American Regional English alludes to all the pull-hauling among churches when a new congregant moves to town.Why do we adjust our working pace to the timelines we're given? The late Cyril Northcote Parkinson explained the phenomenon in his 1955 Economist piece http://www.economist.com/node/14116121, calling it Parkinson's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law. Squiffy, that British slang term for drunk, has also come to mean "askew." At a Roman orgy, for example, you might have found people wearing squiffy laurel crowns. What do you call tourists in your hometown? In New England, they have leaf peepers. In Wisconsin, it's berry pickers or shackers, as in "people who rent cottages." Coastal areas have pukers, a reference to people who charter boats but then can't handle the waves. And in Big Sky, Montana, tourists are known as gapers. Is there a term for words that sound like their first letter? Queue, jay, oh, and the like have been deemed by one listener homoepistulaverbumphones. Well, maybe.What's the plural of pair? Is it correct to say two pairs of socks or two pair of socks? The most common usage is pairs, but it might depend on whether you think of the things as a unit, like socks.Is there a visual difference between g-r-e-y and g-r-a-y http://grammarist.com/spelling/gray-grey/? The grey spelling is more common in the UK; gray is more common in the U.S. Many feel that grey has a delicate, silvery tint, while gray is more opaque, perhaps with warmer tones of red or brown. Martha and Grant disagree about this one.The words anyways, spelled with an s, has come into vogue among writers looking to transition from stilted language into something more reader-friendly.In Michigan, tourists are called trunkslammers for how often they slam their trunk unpacking and repacking over the course of a weekend trip.....Support for A Way with Words also comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. More at http://www.nu.edu/.We're also grateful for support from the University of San Diego. 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