Martin, who lives in San Diego, California, shares some of his favorite surfing slang, including A-frame, boosting, and gnar. He’s curious about the use of gangbusters in filmmaker Bruce Brown’s surfing classic The Endless Summer 2 to describe huge waves. The word gangbusters appears to have originated in the slang of the 1920s, referring to the action of police busting up criminal gangs, a typically noisy affair. This is part of a complete episode.
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...
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