FLYN
n.— «At the FBI, they’ve even coined a special acronym for the product. “They call them FLYNs,” said Fry, who learned this one day when an agent interviewed him for an FBI newsletter. “That stands for ‘funny little yellow notes.’ Except I’m cleaning it up when I say ‘funny.’” Fry clarified. “When field agents submit a report and it comes back with a lot of notes on it, that means it’s a lot more work for them. So they’ll say, ‘Man, I’ve really been flynned.’”» —“Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes” by Greg Beato Rake Apr., 2005. (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 words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...