By the Seat of Your Pants - 3 February 2014

<p>Dude! We're used to hearing the word "dude" applied to guys. But increasingly, young women use the word "dude" to address each other. Grant and Martha talk about linguistic research about the meaning and uses of "dude." Also, the story behind the term "eavesdropping." Originally, it referred to the act of standing outside someone's window. Plus: by and large, by the seat of your pants, drawing room, snowhawk, Netflix o'clock, glegged up, quarry, and that's all she wrote.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />You have 30 cows, and 28 chickens. How many didn't? (Yep, that's the riddle: How many didn't?)<br /><br />Back in the 1930s, airplane pilots didn't have sophisticated instruments to tell them which way was up. When flying through clouds, they literally relied on changes in the vibrations in their seat to help them stay on course, flying by the seat of their pants. The phrase later expanded to mean "making it up as you go along."<br /><br />The idiom by and large, an idiom commonly known to mean "in general," actually combines two sailing terms. To sail by means you're sailing into the wind. To sail large, means that you have the wind more or less at your back. Therefore, by and large encompasses the whole range of possibilities.<br /><br />After a long day of work, you settle in to binge-watch House of Cards, only to discover that everyone else in your time zone wants to watch the same thing, bogging down the Netflix stream. That's Netflix o'clock.<br /><br />Looking glegged up, with staring into space with the mouth agape, comes from glegged, which shows up in some old dialect dictionaries meaning "to look askance."<br /><br />Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle about subtracting letters from words.<br /><br />The term eavesdropping arose from the practice of secretly listening to conversations while standing in the eavesdrip, the gap between houses designed to keep rain dripping off one roof and onto the next.<br /><br />That strip of snow that you can't quite reach down the middle of your car roof? That's