The character of Deadpool Marvel Comics and movie fame takes his name from the term dead pool, originally death pool — originally a sum of money put aside for the family of someone who died in a high-risk race such as car racing, then later...
Why are detectives in old movies and mystery novels called gumshoes? The term gumshoe derives from the image of shoes with soles made of gum rubber, which offered an improvement over the wood traditionally used for the bottom of a shoe, since those...
A Dallas-area police officer is curious about low sick, a term which he and his fellow officers use to describe someone dangerously ill. Sometimes rendered as low sig, the expression is largely associated with the speech of African Americans, and...
Careful what you criticize! Not long ago, some words that sound perfectly normal today were considered gauche and grating on the ear. If the complainers had had their way, we couldn’t say a word like pessimism or use contact as a verb! Also...
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...
The term pigs, in reference to police officers, comes from England’s underground criminal slang and shows up in the early 1800s. It refers to pigs as vile creatures that take more than their share, akin to police officers who would take the...