cutie
n.— «Eduardo Lausse, the darling of Argentina, knows today why they call Milo Savage a “cutie.” The handsome South American had to get off the floor and close with a rush to get a draw in last nights’ 10-round…battle.» —“Savage Draws With Lausse in Tight Boout” by Jack Hand in New York City Reno Evening Gazette (Nev.) Jan. 7, 1956. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...