In basketball, a snowbird is a player who hangs back while the rest of her team plays defense. That way, she’s ready to break for the basket when her team gets the ball. The terms snowbird and snowbirding most likely derive from the use of the...
Smoko, Australian slang for a smoke or cigarette break, also turns up at a British research station in Antarctica. It may have arrived with Australians working there, or it may simply have been handed from one wintering team to the next, the way...
Ruth calls from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to share warm memories of her family’s 3 p.m. coffee breaks. Her Swedish grandparents referred to those breaks as kaffedags, literally “coffee time of day.” (Similarly, matdags in Swedish is “meal time.”)...
Dana in Reno, Nevada, wants a word for that moment when you’re playing cards or a board game and you draw what would have been the perfect card or tile for the previous turn you played. She suggests post-perfect pickup. Might there be others...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s Writer’s Math hides written-out numbers across word breaks in quotations and sentences. The solver hunts consecutive letters spanning two or more words, as in the prompt Launch yourself on every wave, drawn from Thoreau’s...
A bed lunch is a bedtime snack, the kind a parent might offer to settle a child’s stomach before sleep. It’s another case where lunch doesn’t have to mean the midday meal, as in shift work where a legally or company-designated lunch break may...