slab n.— «If you are a Houston m.c. of any note, you probably drive a “slab,” the local word for an enormous American car from the nineteen-seventies or eighties that has been overhauled and tricked out in high-gloss “candy paint...
OKer n.— «There are, of course, many different kinds of editor—from fact-checkers and OKers (as they’re known at the New Yorker), to line-editors and copy editors, to editors who grasp the big picture but skip the detail.» —“Black...
talik n.— «The technical term for thawed permafrost is talik, from a Russian word meaning “not frozen.”» —“The Climate Of Man” by Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker Apr. 18, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued...
cryoturbation adj.— «Temperatures are so low that when tree and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through...
thermokarst n.— «Nearby were the outlines of other, even bigger holes, which, Romanovsky told me, had been filled with gravel by the local public-works department. The holes, known as thermokarsts, had appeared suddenly when the...
drunk adj.— «The trench, he explained, had been formed when a wedge of underground ice had melted. The spruce trees that had been growing next to it, or perhaps on top of it, were now listing at odd angles, as if in a gale. Locally, such...