Some new slang is making the rounds. Hamburger menus are those little stacks of short horizontal lines in the top left corner of websites that function as menus. Webrooming is the act of scoping out goods online only to buy them the store–the...
Erin in Cambridge, Wisconsin, says her Southern boss uses sheep-dip for bringing someone into a process, as in “We are going to sheep dip you right down on in here.” Actual sheep dipping moves sheep through a chemical bath to kill insects and...
After student Leo spotted the phrase, Chris, a fifth-grade teacher in San Diego, California, asks why a thesaurus offered cooking with gas as a synonym for okay. The expression Now you’re cooking with gas emerged in the mid-to-late 1930s, when the...
Long before English speakers adopted the suffix –orama, as in Scoutorama and smell-o-rama, there was the French word panorama referring to “a great display or spectacle.” Panorama comes from Greek words that mean “whole view.” University of Alabama...
Mary in Dallas started hearing cadence at work in phrases like business cadence and organization cadence. In office jargon, it refers to a regular rhythm for scheduling, product releases, reporting, or sales targets. The business use may have been...
Poet Marianne Moore was once asked by the Ford Motor Company to help name a new car coming out in 1955. She suggested Resilient Bullet, Ford Silversword, Varsity Stroke, Pastelogram, and Utopian Turtletop. Ford settled on Edsel, leaving the other...