Fellow wordivas and wordudes, This week on A Way with Words we start a brand-new season! To celebrate, we noodled with anagrams, including the one in the title of this episode. Listen here. Also on the show: A New York City schoolteacher asks, “Why...
twenty-minute takeout n.— «The “security check” used by the CIA to prepare a detainee for transport on a rendition plane was described to us by one source in the American intelligence community as a “twenty-minute takeout.” His explanation was that...
godbag n.— «What the heck happened to these creatures? Did the intelligent designer just get tired or them, or what? Were they reptiles, or birds? The godbag crew says reptiles can’t evolve into birds, so what did the Archy line “microevolve” into...
eef v.— «Deke Dickerson, called a “rock mainstay” in an April 2003 article in Guitar Player Magazine, is an old “eefer” himself. He explains that eefin is a “sort of wheezing-in-rhythm thing that was popular amongst hillbillies. It goes WAY back...
slagosphere n.— «In a recent interview about his controversy-baiting wife Ayelet Waldman, novelist Michael Chabon condemned “the slagosphere”—that merciless virtual coliseum in which anyone with a DSL can publicly eviscerate any celebrity...
booger up v. phr.— «The road takes you straight up the foothills at a six or seven percent grade; in places, the lines on the road disappear completely, and there’s not a whole heck of a lot of runoff in most places. If you get boogered up, as they...
