“If you come to a fork in the road… take it!” Baseball legend Yogi Berra was famous for such head-scratching observations. What most people don’t realize, though, is that the former Yankees star often wasn’t the first...
A listener who works with computers asked about the difference between premise and premises, especially when it comes to the idea of on- or off-premises computing. Going back to the 1600’s, the term premises has meant a “location”...
The world of politics tops this week’s language headlines, including an explanation of the Bradley effect, and the ongoing debate over bilingual education. Also, what does the word fubsy mean? Grant has the answer and reports about a new...
unconference n.— «Unconferences are gaining popularity in the high-tech community as self-organizing forums for idea sharing, networking, learning, speaking, demonstrating, and generally interacting with other geeks. The unconference...
trick lit n.— «Trick Lit is the term for a chick lit novel that pretends to be something else, hoping to rope people in with an interesting premise. 30 pages later, you discover that you were deceived, that it’s just another piece of...
food shed n.— «Noting that “(t)he premise of this method of adjusting exposure estimates is that varia tion in the pattern of distribution of the commodity across the population does not lead to significant differences in exposure...