Ever wonder what medieval England looked and sounded like? In Old English, the word hord meant “treasure” and your wordhord was the treasure of words locked up inside you. A delightful new book uses the language of that period to create...
Connie in Santee, California, is curious about a term she read in Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed history of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon). A shotgun house is a narrow house, the width...
boat n.— «Edison Senat learned how to speak English in five months. The 26-year-old Haiti native didn’t want to be tagged as “boat,” a derogatory term referring to immigrants. So he made it a point to speak it as often as he...
Haitian happiness n.— «Haitian Hapiness—(verb) Abnormally frequent and abnormally fluid evacuation of the bowels.» —“Haitian Hapiness Defined and Explained” Livesay Haiti WebLog (La Digue, Haiti) May 12, 2006...
manpad n.— «The Nicaraguan army sold nearly 400 shoulder-fired missiles—known in military parlance as manpads, or man-portable air defense systems—to the warring countries.» —“Rumsfeld on Mission for Haiti Aid” by John...
buscone n.— «The new system calls for Dominican and Haitian buscones, or recruiters, to go to Haiti and promise workers easy money, good housing and soft jobs.» —“Haitians feel oppression from Dominican bias” by Gregory...