How can you kick the verbal habit of saying you know and um so many times in a sentence? For one thing, get comfortable with pauses. There’s no need to fill every silence during a conversation. Also, a doctor who treats patients in Appalachia...
In his delightful memoir Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Bookshop|Amazon), Christian Cooper introduces the vocabulary of birding, including the term warbler neck, an affliction among fellow birders. Cooper...
black-birding n.— «The settlers found it difficult to recruit workers from among the warring tribes. With this began the pernicious trade in human beings: unsuspecting people were kidnapped or lured onto visiting ships on the other...
bins n.pl.— «This chance encounter brought birds to his attention, the scales fell from his eyes, and he began to take notice of them, and the peculiar, underground fraternity (and sorority) who stalk them with bins (birding shorthand for...

