Brian from Lafayette, Indiana, wonders why chicken is abbreviated CHX in the restaurant industry. Using X as a substitute or shortener has a long history. Medieval scribes sometimes drew a line through the final stroke of an abbreviated word. This...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski pitches a puzzle about the names of minor-league baseball teams. For example, which team’s name might refer either to a type of weather phenomenon or a wooden roller coaster on the Coney Island boardwalk? This is part of a...
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 satirizes such...
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...
Did you know reading poetry improves your prose? That includes hip-hop lyrics, too. Also, how linguist can guess where you come from based on how you speak. What do you call someone who picks the chocolate out of the trail mix? Plus, champing at...
Some New York City street names also denote whole industries, such as Wall Street and Madison Avenue. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Industry Street Names” Out of all the New York language that I know, I think the street names...
