What do you call it when you’re about to jump into a conversation but someone beats you to it? Mary, a caller and self-described introvert from Indianapolis, calls it getting seagulled, inspired by an episode of The Simpsons in which nerdy...
Paul from Duluth, Minnesota, heard Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, quoting Boston Mayor Tom Menino, call a health-care law an alcatraz around his neck. The idiom is albatross around your neck, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the...
Should you use myriad or myriad of? Actually, either is fine. Here’s what David Foster Wallace had to say about the question in his commentary for the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus: “[A]ny reader who’s bugged by a myriad...