blue jacking n.— «At the age of 10 he sold newspapers in downtown Toledo.…They didn’t have a normal paper route like most kids, delivering to the same house every day in nice, quiet neighborhoods. This young boy and his friend...
Pass the Gatorade! Martha and Grant work up a sweat in this episode as they tackle a sports quiz and lob vocabulary questions back and forth. They also settle a family dispute about the pronunciation of eco-friendly and unlock the etymology of...
Welcome to another edition of the A Way with Words newsletter. What was college slang like 100 years ago? That's what we talked about on the air this past weekend. We also talked about "go fly a kite," nicknames for Vancouver, and why...
wobble n.— «How could WHUR (96.3 FM)—a station that played essentially the same type of music, had the same on-air personalities and didn’t undertake any special audience-building promotions during the spring—surge so far, so fast? WHUR’s...
BUI n.— «So Mr. Roy still lives near campus, in a 10-foot-by-12-foot room, and rides his bicycle to college house parties. (Drunken riders get B.U.I.’s—“biking under the influence” tickets.) He plays in a band that “sounds like Tom...
ideologically inbred adj.— «College towns have cosmopolitan amenities (lectures, music, ethnic restaurants, libraries) but also an almost surreal degree of cultural cohesion—“ideologically inbred” communities where residents read, watch...