In the Private Voices corpus of American Civil War letters, soldiers use pill and pills for bullets, including Lincoln’s pills and Abe’s pills. The slang is far older than the Civil War. Pill referred to cannonballs by at least the 1600s and to...
Have you ever been faced with a defugalty? This ironic misspelling and mispronunciation of difficulty popped up in a Dashiell Hammett novel, They Glass Key, in 1931. It’s often said with a tongue in the cheek, but, as in the case of the Hammett...