picker
n.— «Among the regulars, the sense of community is very real. By late afternoon each day, the prospectors gather—beers in hand—to compare notes on the day’s haul. They pull out glass vials full of glittering dust and show off their “pickers “— pieces large enough to be picked up by hand. “I got three nice pickers out today,” Stevens tells McGrath. “Yesterday I got four and last week I got a big one—maybe a quarter gram.”» —“It’s a lode on their minds” by Ashraf Khalil Los Angeles Times July 14, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...
What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus, a new book shows what’s lost when a language dies: when there...