If you catch your blue jeans on a nail, you may find yourself with a winklehawk. This term, adapted into English from Dutch, means “an L-shaped tear in a piece of fabric.” And: What’s your relationship with the books on your...
Gila in Woodridge, Connecticut, wonders if there’s a connection between the adjective patient, meaning able to withstand delay, pain, or problems, and the noun patient, meaning a person who is sick. Both derive from Latin adjective patientem...
What’s your hobby? Or, rather, do you call your interests or passions hobbies at all, or does the word hobby connote something frivolous or strangely obsessive? The term hobby goes back to a nickname for a horse, which transferred to the...
zot v.— «That was only _one_ of the times he was struck by lightning while filming the movie. He got zotted twice.» —“Re: The Passion of Mel” by groo Usenet: alt.fan.cecil-adams Feb. 20, 2004. (source: Double...
therapism n.— «Therapism is an overvaulation of feeling. In a real sense, it is a tyranny of feelings where women have come to believe that what realy counts in their life is their “psychology.”…We might say that...
soup bunch n.— «“I still hope it’ll become a kitchen staple the way it is in Europe,” he says, noting that produce markets in Germany offer a popular bundle of celery root, carrots, and onions as a suppebund, or “soup bunch...