If you’re looking for a great book about writing, Martha recommends Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. In it, Constance Hale offers an accessible, bang-up course in writing with excerpted passages that really show how the...
Spanglish. What’s it all about? Is it a real language, or just a funky amalgam? Ilan Stavans‘ book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language traces the varieties of Spanglish that have sprung up around the country, and includes...
shakabatt n.— «There is no more shakabatt [pidgin English for fighting], no more chopping people, because of the street lights.» —“As street lights return to Liberia, so does hope” by Prue Clarke in Monrovia...
sing-sing n.— «Women and children also dressed in traditional finery danced and sang at the event, known in PNG pidgin as a “sing-sing.”» —“PNG tribes put on a show of colours” by Lloyd Jones in Goroka...
lummi stick n.— «Youngsters will learn to cook with a stick over an open fire, make a “lummi stick”—a cylindrical percussion instrument—and add a few words to their vocabulary from the WaWa jargon, a pidgin once used by Oregon...
wantok n.— «Feuds can last months, even years, in a country in which allegiance to “wantok,” literally “one talk,” the pidgin English term for a person’s language group or tribe, is paramount.» —“Tribal rows...