“If you come to a fork in the road… take it!” Baseball legend Yogi Berra was famous for such head-scratching observations. What most people don’t realize, though, is that the former Yankees star often wasn’t the first...
Corby in San Diego, California, grew up hearing Navy fighter-pilot slang from her father. A pilot who bangs off the cat launches from an aircraft carrier by catapult, and the meatball is the amber light in the optical landing system that helps line...
Some people proudly embrace the label cancer survivor, while others feel that’s not quite the right word. Is there a better term for someone who’s battled cancer? Writers and listeners share the best sentence they’ve read all day...
Charles in Virginia asks about breaking bad, a phrase he grew up hearing to mean “raise hell,” “get wild,” or stop being nice, as in threatening to “break bad on” someone. Vince Gilligan, a Virginian, made the expression nationally familiar with the...
Vape, meaning “to smoke an electronic cigarette,” is among the entries in Grant’s tenth annual Words of the Year List for The New York Times. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Vaping” All right...
Grant has compiled his ninth annual words-of-the-year piece for The New York Times Sunday Review section. Among these gems is the verb doxing, as in documenting someone’s life and share it on the web. What were your picks for the words of 2012...