The idiom “to cut off your nose to spite your face” has been attributed to a Medieval nun who described women cutting off their noses to look unattractive and thus preserve their chastity. Whether that story is true, cutting off someone’s nose was a...
What happens when a clock gets hungry? It goes back four seconds. Martha talks about how puns weren’t always considered “bad.” Cicero praised them as the wittiest kind of saying, and Shakespeare made plenty of them, for both serious and comic effect...
Stories From The Onion In this week’s episode, Martha and Grant discuss not-to-be-believed articles about language from the satirical newspaper The Onion, including one headlined “Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from Language Programs...
hitling n.— «Attaching labels such as “racist” or even “Fascist” to anyone criticizing massive immigration or Multiculturalism has become so common that Norwegian anti-Islamists have coined a new word for it: “Hitling,” which could be roughly...
red light fever n.— «Some people have red-light fever, they can’t wait to be in front of a camera. I can’t wait to be off the camera, basically, which isn’t to say I don’t get great pleasure when it works.» —“The Revenge Of The Nerd” by Peter...
Saddam’s revenge n.— «Though Mr. Ross’s life was never imperiled during his tour, he managed to contract a particularly nasty strain of dysentery, which American soldiers call Saddam’s Revenge.» —“With ‘Patriot Act,’ Jeffrey Ross Follows in Bob...
