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 escargot...
Why can’t you tear the tag off a mattress? And why do old books say that the right of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian, is reserved? These bits of jargon, not necessarily intended for the consumer, have seeped into our...