Kerry from Omaha, Nebraska, wonders why smack dab means “precisely in the middle.” Long used in Appalachia and the American South to make a term more emphatic, smack also appears in such phrases as right smack now and smack jam and smack...
William Faulkner used adjectives like shadowdabbled, Augusttremulous, and others that can only be described as, well, Faulknerian. Grant and Martha trade theories about why the great writer chose them. The University of Virginia has an online audio...
DAB n.— «Whether this move will calm the capital, much less help stabilize Iraqi politics, depends in part on what the troops and MPs end up doing. Will they just “drive around Baghdad” (the term even has a jaundiced acronym...