stroking
n.— «Tweaking the Chase format in such minor ways would be perfectly fine if NASCAR had the courage to address the real problem. The problem isn’t how many people get to be in the 10-race “playoffs,” but the system of how points are counted.…More than any of those platitudes that are nothing more than euphemisms for “points racing” or, in the term that people in the sport once used, “stroking.”» —“Winning should matter more in Nextel points system” by David Poole in Charlotte, North Carolina Mercury News (San Jose, California) Jan. 14, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
A member of our Facebook group reports that her mother used to deride a privileged and expensively dressed woman with the phrase, Oh, she thinks she’s so katish! Used since the 1890s in the North Central part of the United States, katish or...