British broadcaster, comedian, and logophile Stephen Fry offers a helpful if tongue-in-cheek suggestion in his newsletter The Fry Corner: Let’s all write AI, the shortened form of artificial intelligence, as Ai. Fry reasons that the upper-case...
If you’re feeling poorly, you have several options for expressing how crummy you feel, including: I feel like death on a soda cracker, I feel lower than a snake in a wagon rut, I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put up wet, or I feel...
Debbie from Keokuk, Iowa, shares a funny story about her family’s tradition of speed-cleaning the house if guests were coming over. Her mother would declare, “Quick, guys! Whited sepulchre approach!” Her use of the term whited...
The expression you look like death eating on a Nab means “you look terrible.” It’s a humorous elaboration of the idea of death, which refers to death consuming a dry, salty, peanut-butter-filled snack made by the Nabisco company...
Deadpan, an adjective used to describe a flat or unsmiling affect, as in deadpan humor, derives from the use of pan as a slang term for “face.”
This is part of a complete episode.
A chemist who spent years working in the pharmaceutical industry sent us an amusing sendup of corporatespeak that begins, “It is what it is, so let’s all reach out and circle the wagons…” Although his jargon-laden riff wonderfully...