necklace light n.— «The lights on the bridge cables, in a colorful bit of shop talk, are called “necklace lights.” The phrase, or a variation of it, appears to have been around for a couple of decades (a caption on a 1981 New York Times...
sandwich eater n.— «The official team wasn’t just kinda late, but also ineffective, according to those on the ground. “Those guys are called ‘the sandwich eaters’…The official clean-up guys hang out in their vans and then walk...
Martha reminisces about her family’s mountain roots while dipping into the delicious vocabulary of Southernisms found in The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. When ya’ll listen to this one, you’ll find out what a...
hoss election n.— «When they read the column here pondering the origin of the term “Hoss Elections,” a Hawai’i phrase used to describe those senior class hall-of-fame awards in high school, the Valdez’s were the only ones to...
show-ga n.— «We are always experimenting with our show. I think we were just having fun naturally playing off each other on stage one day and did backbends facing each other and someone took a picture. (See photo above.) It really became...
ground-truthing n.— «They use the photos to plot GPS coordinates of questionable places and then hit the water for a closer look. The process is called “ground-truthing.” “The more groundtruthing we do, the better the map’s going to be,”...