Creative communication in a noisy world! Writing a clever 140-character tweet isn’t easy. But you know what’s even more impressive? Working all 26 letters of the alphabet into just one sentence! The term for that type of sentence is pangram...
Jennifer from Traverse City, Michigan, asks about using reef to mean applying a lot of force or torque, as in reefing on a stuck window or stubborn jar. This regional verb likely comes from the sailing use of reef, to reduce a sail by taking in part...
swath n.— «It’s a really strange ship, it’s what’s called a swath. It’s a giant catamaran.…It’s only 60 metres long. It’s meant to be very stable. It typically works out of Hawaii and works out in the deep Pacific Ocean, but because it’s a nice...
cultchless adj.— «The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, for example, stood by as nearly 750,000 such “cultchless” oysters were eaten by cow-nosed rays in two days earlier this spring at a reef site on the Piankatank River. Cultchless is another term for a...
reef v.— «So I reefed on it, and he reefed back. There was a lot of reefing. He was surprisingly strong, and was pulling against my banged-up left hand with all his fury, and I was mortified to discover I was spending a Friday night wrestling with...
reef v.— «Hauled it up the route 3x, once yarding it through the chimney up top (the other times i swung it onto the face). pack got hung up on a couple of the overlaps, but i just reefed on it rather than being gentle.» —“Prototypes, Production...