POSSLQ was devised by a worker at the U.S. Census Bureau as an acronym for Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters or Partner of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. Pronounced “possle-cue,” this term caught on briefly in the...
TTWWADI, (pronounced “tee-tee-waddy”) serves as a useful bit of shorthand for That’s The Way We’ve Always Done It. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “TTWWADI” On our Facebook page, Sandy Wolf...
Sending someone a care package shows you care, of course. But the first care packages were boxes of food and personal items for survivors of World War II. They were from the Committee for American Remittances to Europe, the acronym for which is CARE...
Kirsten in Evanston, Illinois, reports that when she and her husband lived in a co-op at the University of Michigan, they and their friends used the acronym GUFF for “general use free food,” which anyone was free to eat. The word GUFF...
Responding to our conversation about slang expressions for traveling by foot, a listener says that while growing up in Montreal, Canada, in the 1980s, she and her friends would refer to that mode of transportation as going by BMW, an acronym for...
According to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, it’s important to master the basics of writing, but there comes a time when you have to strike out on your own and teach yourself. Also: Spanish idioms involving food, a conversation about the...