Camden from Juneau, Alaska, uses the term gaffle to mean “snag,” as in to gaffle a Coke from the fridge. In his 1872 work A Dictionary of Etymology (Bookshop|Amazon), philologist Hensleigh Wedgwood notes that in a variety of languages, words like gaff and gaffle describe hook-like instruments used for grabbing. Gaffle shows up in American English around 1900 as a verb meaning “to grasp” or “to seize.” In modern hip-hop, gaffle can mean to “rob,” “steal,” “swindle,” or “be harassed or arrested by the police.” This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...