Blackacre, Whiteacre, and Greenacre are legal placeholder names for imaginary parcels of land, the real-estate cousins of doohickey and whatchamacallit. Lawyers and law students use them in hypotheticals about land transfers, taxes, and other...
Is there a word you keep having to look up in the dictionary, no matter how many times you’ve looked it up before? Maybe it’s time for a mnemonic device. And: a listener shares a letter from Kurt Vonnegut himself, with some reassuring...
A law student wonders about the origin of the word widget. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Etymology of Widget” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name’s Arela Wright from Indianapolis, Indiana, and I was...
next-war-itis n.— «“By keeping Gates in there you have a guy who’s really pushing for, ‘Hey, let’s get off this next-war-itis crap,’” said Barnett, using the term Gates coined to describe the defense establishment’s obsession with a...
ecoflation n.— «The findings are based on “future analysis” of how much certain commodities will go up, including oil, cereal, soy and palm oil, and how they will fare under certain environmental, governmental policy and...
strangelet n.— «But Wagner and Sancho’s court papers raise theoretical scenarios in which the LHC could create particles that gobble up the Earth, such as “killer strangelets.” Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter...