A San Antonio, Texas, caller wonders: What’s a good word for a shortcut that ends up taking much longer than the recommended route? You might call the opposite of a shortcut a longcut, or perhaps even a longpaste. But there’s also the...
A sixth-grade teacher from San Antonio, Texas, says he and his students are reading The Lord of the Rings. They’re curious about the words attercop, which means “spider” (and a relative of the word cobweb) and Tomnoddy, which means...
the newlywed and the nearly dead other.— «Since our town had no “tech boom” there was never a new influx of young habitants to modernize the landscape. Instead we have what we like to call neighborhoods of “the newlywed...
We hear the word maverick a lot lately, but where did this term for a stubborn nonconformist come from? Martha tells the story of the Texas politician who inspired the word, and whose grandson apparently coined another familiar English word...
skin area n.— «It was more than 40 miles to the destroyed zone by ruck march, a forced troop march carrying gear and armaments which can weigh in excess of 100 pounds. The term used to describe the region of the country is the “skin...
cascaron n.— Note: Cascarón is Spanish for “eggshell.” «In late April, tiny pastel bits of a giant San Antonio party show up everywhere: trickling from your hair, embedded in the carpet under your desk, stuck to your furniture...