A San Diego, California, listener shares some slang used by her father, who was a Navy fighter pilot. To “bang off the cat” is to take off from an aircraft carrier. The meatball refers to the landing system that requires lining up with an amber...
Sam Anderson, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, tweets the best sentence he reads each day, like this from D.H. Lawrence describing the affection of Italians: “They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips...
The hosts discuss Ammon Shea’s recent New York Times Magazine column about whether a large vocabulary filled with obscure and unusual words is all that necessary. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Large, Obscure Vocabulary” You’re...
sidezoomer n.— «Sidezoomers have a variety of strategies, each exaggerated by the configuration of the Caldecott but replicated in bottlenecks across the land: there are the ones who zoom by a few dozen cars, angling in when they see a plausible...
genderqueer adj.— «Even though Melissa always defined herself as a lesbian, she said her partner’s transition made sense to her. Part of the couple’s sangfroid is generational—she and Rey see themselves as genderqueer rather than gay. For them...
top surgery n.— «He was in the process of legally changing his name to a male name, although he couldn’t decide whether to go casual (Rey) or Old Testament (Asher). And in December Rey underwent what he called “chest reconstruction surgery,” also...