Cathead Biscuits (Rebroadcast) - 28 November 2011

<p>SUMMARY<br /><br />Ever eaten golden catheads for breakfast? Yum! A listener shares this Southern term for big, fluffy biscuits. Also, how did people greet each other before "hello" became a standard greeting of choice? What does it mean if someone's fair to middling? How do you pronounce the word bury? Is the phrase whether or not redundant? Should we use try to or try and? And if Sam and them are coming, who exactly is "them"? Plus, Grant and Martha share some classic riddles, and Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game of animal name mash-ups.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />What happens when you throw a yellow rock into a purple stream? It splashes. (Ba-dump-bum.) Grant and Martha share this and other favorite riddles, some with deceptively obvious answers.<br /><br />Why do we pronounce bury like berry and not jury? The word originates in the Old English term byrgan, and the pronunciation apparently evolved differently in different parts of England. Grant explains why many terms go mispronounced if we read things without hearing them out loud.<br /><br />What do you say when you answer the telephone? On the NPR science blog, "Krulwich Wonders," Robert Krulwich notes that hello did not become a standard greeting until the mid-19th Century, when the Edison Company recommended the word as a proper phone greeting. Before that, English speakers used a variety of phrases depending on the circumstance, from hail to how are you? One thing's certain: If we'd followed Alexander Graham Bell's recommendation, we'd all be greeting each other with "Ahoy!" <br /><br />http://n.pr/gscLCA<br /><br />A riddle, a riddle, I suppose, a thousand eyes and never a nose. Nothing shakes up the dinner table conversation like a good potato riddle!<br /><br />Greg Pliska, musical director for the Broadway show War Horse and our very own Quiz Guy, has a puzzle about Animal Hybrid Phrases combining two common expressions involving animals. For example, what do you get when stuffed animal stocks go down? A Teddy Bear Market.<br /><br />Here'