Grant Barrett said "The Quarry," a famous painting of a buck carcass by Gustave Courbet, is a hint to another definition of quarry: the guts of an animal given to dogs after a hunt.
I've been trying unsuccessfully for years to revive the old Scottish hunting term gralloch, defined as "to disembowel a stag". It's a perfect metaphor for the process of painstakingly debugging a failing program to see exactly where and how it's going wrong.
A few words on this show are still fairly used in New Zealand.
Skedaddle is often used to herd children out of the way. e.g. "You lot, skedaddle out of the kitchen". This fits nicely with the image of an unorganised retreat. My school teacher wife says that she and others use it on their class to get them moving from A to B.
It is also sometimes used as an informal way to excuse yourself. If I was at a bar with a friend, he may look at his watch, down the rest of his drink and sigh.. "Well, I better skedaddle".
The other word is the alternate use of "cute". No one here (in New Zealand) would bat an eyelid at hearing cute being used like that. Although we tend to phrase it as "being cute", and is used when someone gets away with something. It is used a lot in sports commentary. e.g. someone lands a 'hail mary' shot in basketball from halfway as the buzzer is going off. The commentator might say " he was being cute there", getting away with something he probably shouldn't have.
If I try and help my father to use his phone and get frustrated and snap at him, he might reply "Don't try and get cute with me , kiddo".
My son-in-law calls my daughter "dude." Took some getting used to, but I'm on board now.
Yep. My son-in-law calls my daughter "dude." I had to get used to that.
Two (very late) comments on this show:
(1) More an anecdote than anything, but if you get up into a plane and grab the controls, you can get a real sense of what the phrase "by the seat of your pants" means. When controlling a plane, you have three axes of rotation (pitch (the nose goes up or down), roll (the wing tips go up or down), and yaw (the nose goes left or right)), each of which is controlled by a different mechanism (elevators and ailerons on the stick or yoke, and the rudder by way of pedals). When turning, all three controls are used, and must be coordinated properly. If a turn is uncoordinated, then the forces acting on the plane in the turn will tend to push the pilot to the right or left, rather than right down into the seat. Hence you can easily tell that a turn is uncoordinated by the feeling in the seat of your pants.
(2) In the same conversation, you mention the phrase "to wing it" as another aeronautical term. My understanding is that the term is actually theatrical. The image that I have always had is of an actor who can't remember his lines, and the person with the script hanging out in the wings of the theater, prompting the actor. I am curious about what the correct etymology is (and, as I am no longer a student, my free access to the OED is gone).