Stories From The Onion In this week’s episode, Martha and Grant discuss not-to-be-believed articles about language from the satirical newspaper The Onion, including one headlined “Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from...
sideshow n.— «Sgt. Lou Cruz said the boy, whose name was not released, was being driven home by friends just before 4 a.m. Saturday when they were caught in the middle of a sideshow at 90th and Bancroft avenues and someone shot at the...
mobbing n.— «The students, all boys and football players, allegedly surrounded another student in a school hallway during lunch Nov. 20 and punched the student’s arms, chest and back as part of a practice some call “mobbing...
interrupter n.— «CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while...
flagging n.— «Investigators say teenage gangs are loosely defined as, “a group a juveniles who form an allegiance, claim a territory, and wear common colors or articles of clothing.” That practice is called “flagging.”» —“Girl Gangs:...
gang-cutting n.— «Prosecutors allege he led a multi-state ring that clipped bundles of coupons at a time from newspaper inserts—a practice known as “gang-cutting”—and sent them to IOS for processing, pretending they’d been...