In what sport would you hear the slang terms glass off, speck out, and get flushed? They’re all expressions used in paragliding. Glass-off refers to a smooth, effortless takeoff; to speck out is to go so high that you’re nearly invisible...
A government official in New Zealand has devised a new Maori-based glossary to replace some of the English words used by the government for talking about mental health, disability, and addiction. For example, he proposes replacing the word autism...
Have you ever offered to foster a dog or cat, but wound up adopting instead? There’s an alliterative term for that. And when you’re on the job, do niceties like “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” make you sound too...
A native of Houston, Texas, moves a few hundred miles north to Dallas and discovers that people there say she’s wrong to call the road alongside the highway a “feeder road” rather than a “frontage road.” Actually, both...
Professional wrestling may be staged, but its insider vocabulary is vivid and precise. The PW Torch newsletter’s online glossary records phrases such as red means green, the old ringside saying that a wrestler who bleeds during a bout earns a...
Mitch in Miami works with video playback systems for theme parks and museums, where to ingest a file is to load outside video into the system. Taking it back out is more than simply deleting it, he says, because clients may assume that’s quick and...