Mia from Iowa City, Iowa, says she and her fiance disagree about the intensity of meaning in the words bummed and bummer. Does the term to bum someone out refer to “being a source of mild aggravation” or does it imply something closer to...
As a kid, you may have played that game where you phone someone to say, “Is your refrigerator running? Then you better go catch it!” What’s the term for that kind of practical joke? Is it a crank call or a prank call? There’s...
After our conversation about a verbose admonition to use short words, a Tallahassee, Florida, man called with a version he learned as a boy: Do you have the audacity to doubt my veracity? Or even to insinuate that I would prevaricate? While...
rark up v. phr.— «The Brumbies had no answer to the CC forward surges, the Waratahs shied away when the big hits went in, and the Reds just had no answers. This does not bode well, as Mitchell is noted for rarking up the forward intensity...
mail it in v. phr.— «They jumped on us and never got off.…We could have just mailed it in tonight. We didn’t have the intensity we had at home and we never got into it.» —“Malones and Stockton Too Jazzy for...
olf n. a scientific measure of indoor odor intensity. Etymological Note: olfaction unit, from the Latin olfactus ‘the action or capacity of smelling; the sense of smell.’ Coined by Danish scientist Povl Ole Fanger in 1987. The first cite is his...