The mouthful supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is often associated with the song by the same name in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins. But versions of this word were around for decades, including in a 1949 song called...
golden coffin n.— «On a related measure sponsored by The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Pension Plan Fund, voters defeated a proposal to end death benefits, also known as “golden coffins,” granted...
Hey! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words," which this week was called "entertainingly erudite" by William Safire in the New York Times. Suh-weet! Our latest erudition came in the form of talk about "apple...
tweening n.— «When Disney’s artists created dancing mushrooms almost 70 years ago, they did so by drawing still pictures on dozens of celluloid pages, or “cels.” But, Lopez and his fellow students are learning to use a...
Floridana n.— «Old postcards are one facet of what some collectors call kitsch and others prefer to call “Floridana”—a broader term that extends beyond the simply silly and encompasses a vast body of memorabilia with one thing in common:...
happy-clappy adj.— «You don’t have to be a happy-clappy Silicon Valley hippie to see that computer-driven virtual reality is set to upstage Euro Disney before the millennium. » —“In This Sterile Diorama, Life Is but a...