When Sean in New York City contemplated telling his boss he wasn’t coming into work the next day, he texted a friend that he might bang out sick. He wonders about the phrase, which he picked up from his father, a police dispatcher in New York City. The more common expression is bang in sick, although both variants are used. In his 2006 book The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (Amazon), Grant traced the phrase back to the 1980s, although he’s since followed it back to the 1960s. It’s particularly common among firefighters, police officers, and other civil servants in New York, Boston, and other cities along the U.S. East Coast. This is part of a complete episode.
Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...
Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...
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