Stellar first sentences from Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork (Bookshop|Amazon) about her quest to become a sommelier and from A Tale of Two Cities (Bookshop|Amazon) by Charles Dickens.This is part of a complete episode.
scalejacking n.— «Dave Balter coined this great term. It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality. The internet...
Word nerd Ammon Shea quit his job as a furniture mover in New York City to spend an entire year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary. The result, in addition to eyestrain, headaches, and skeptics’ puzzlement, was Shea’s new book...
nerdfury n.— «At that point, what drivingblind likes to call the nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and—most important to...
Toronto trim n.— «Certain procedures can drastically improve a woman’s sexual experience, insist the surgeons. The labia minora reduction for example, or the “Toronto Trim,” as it’s known among Dr Stubbs’s patients, makes the...
babyhead n.— «The group trudges onward, scrambling over teetering scree—rocks first the size of oranges and then as big as volleyballs (called “babyheads” in climbing lingo).» —“Former Texas lawmaker heads for the hills...