When your server brings food to the table and inquires as to who ordered which dish, that’s informally known in the restaurant biz as auctioning. If your meal is delayed because the person who took your order forgot about it, that’s called a pocketticket. If you send back food because it’s not warm enough, that may be a job for Chef Mike, also known as the microwave oven, the use of which is jokingly known as cookingà la ding. Writer Ben Schott has collected this and other lingo from dozens of subcultures in Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
In English, you can express skepticism with the classic saying when pigs fly. In Tagalog, a similar sentiment is expressed with a phrase that translates “when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black,” and there’s a Hungarian phrase that...
Dax in Santa Cruz, California, wonders: Now that we’re into the 21st century, when will people stop saying that initial 20 when referring to a year such as 2028 the way we dropped the 19 in the term 1980s and just started referring to the ’80s? This...
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