email bankruptcy
n.— «If you’ve been waiting for internet legal visionary Lawrence Lessig to reply to your e-mail, forget about it. In a script-driven note sent out last week, Lessig wrote: “Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail, I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy.”» —“Call It the Dead E-Mail Office” by Michael Fitzgerald Wired June 7, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Welcome to another A Way with Words newsletter! With any luck, our A Way with Words email messages don’t end up in your spam folder. But did you ever wonder why junk mail is called spam in the first place? There’s a funny story behind this term, and...
Responding to our conversation about slang expressions for traveling by foot, a listener says that while growing up in Montreal, Canada, in the 1980s, she and her friends would refer to that mode of transportation as going by BMW, an acronym for...