During our online discussion about how being focused on one’s phone or camera can distract from fully participating in an experience, a listener brought up the term chimping. As we’ve noted before, chimping refers to fiddling with the...
The creepy, dystopian, and weirdly wonderful TV series Severance offers a teachable moment in the form of a false etymology in a flaky self-help book by one of the characters. The book suggests that the word camaraderie derives from the type of a...
The anatomy of effective prose, and the poetry of anatomy. Ever wonder what it’d be like to audit a class taught by a famous writer? A graduate student’s essay offers a taste of a semester studying with author Annie Dillard. Also, what...
There’s a new kind of hamburger menu that involves pixels, not pickles. It’s that little stack of horizontal lines in the corner of a webpage that you click to see more options. You might use a hamburger menu while webrooming–that...
Selfie has turned out to be a word that keeps on giving. We have dronies, or selfies taken with drones; healfies, wherein fitness enthusiasts photograph themselves; and now the selfie stick, the most revolutionary selfie-taking device since arms...
squircle v.—Gloss: To make a square photograph of a round object. Note: There is a Flickr group of such photos. «This must be photographed quite a bit, but i do wonder if it has been squircled.» —by...