Barb in Boston, Massachusetts, once worked on Wall Street for a British bank that had an office that handled tizzy-hunting, devoted to uncovering scams and fraud. In A Dictionary of the Underworld (Bookshop|Amazon), slang lexicographer Eric...
A young woman from Portland, Oregon, seeks a noun to denote something fake or otherwise dubious. She doesn’t want an obvious swear word, but also doesn’t like the ones she found in the thesaurus. She thinks malarkey, poppycock, and flim...
fitting the flaps n.— «Lip Synchronisation, known in America as “fitting the flaps,” is a means of ensuring that the sound of the words being spoken matched the lip movements of the onscreen speaker.» —“Lost in...
hydraulicking n.— «It’s not unheard of, particularly in the area of investment apartments and the practice of same-day selling, when a property is bought and sold by a middleman with a friendly valuer and a gullible end purchaser. The...
job and knock n.— «A regular inquiry theme has been the RailCorp tradition of “job and knock”—a term for leaving a job after only a couple of hours but charging for the whole day.» —“Employee goes back to work despite...
mail-boxing n.— «Mail theft occurs so frequently that criminals have even coined a new verb: “mail-boxing.”» —“Mail fraud raises a red flag” The Acorn (Agoura Hills, California) Apr. 17, 2008...