Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, wonders when words like senior and senior citizen came to mean “elderly.” Senior comes from Latin senex, “old,” the source also of Senate and senile. In the 1930s, a politician helped popularize...
Brian from Washington, D.C., wonders about the term proc. It’s used by video-game enthusiasts to refer to an event triggered by particular circumstances or actions. Proc can also be used as a verb, and apparently derives from spec_proc, a...
At a Seattle, Washington, tech company, Vivian finds that she and her fellow employees are continually vexed by this question: Does bimonthly mean “once every two weeks” or “once every two months”? This is part of a complete...
Greg in San Antonio, Texas, who works in the tech industry, says he and his co-workers use the phrase shaving yak hair to describe a monotonous, tedious task. The phrase was inspired by a 1991 segment of The Ren and Stimpy Show, in which the title...
A discussion on the English Language & Usage Stack Exchange about things that can still be useful even if they longer function properly, such as escalators and moving sidewalks, included several intriguing expressions involving partial failure...
Katie in East Thetford, Vermont, shares NICU slang from a neonatal intensive care unit, where a doorbell is an alarm summoning a team and a Giraffe is a brand-name bed that controls heat and humidity for an infant. The PANDA Room is the Preterm and...