Will, an emergency medical technician in Queens, New York, offers this bit of lingo from his line of work: skell, meaning a “lowlife.” In South African slang, the word skelm means the same thing. Will and his colleagues also use the term skell gel to mean “hand sanitizer.” The 17th-century English term skelder meant “someone who would feign an injury in order to be a more effective panhandler or con artist.” This word likely isn’t related to modern skell because there’s a centuries-long gap between its use then and when skell pops up in Brooklyn in the mid-20th century. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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