A hazy, hot, and humid hello! In this week’s archive episode, we take on headlines that make you do a double take, such as “Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden” and “Milk Drinkers Turn To Powder.” We discuss a...
Favorite online reading. If the subjunctive tense were to disappear from English, would anybody care? And just in time for this romantic weekend, a caller discovers the meaning of…lurve. That’s L-U-R-V-E.
Apatown n.— «It sounds like fun and games—the boozy, all-woman answer to those close-knit gangs of Hollywood boy-men captured on screen in “Entourage” and embodied by the real-life Apatown, the industry moniker for filmmaker Judd Apatow’s...
Cleave, dust, and screen are all words that can mean the opposite of themselves. You can cleave to a belief, meaning to “adhere closely,” but you can also separate things by cleaving them. Words that mean the opposite of themselves go by...
flipper n.— «So CNN last week replaced the crawl with what it calls the flipper—a move, Mr. Feder said, that was designed to impart information but that “doesn’t give viewers a headache.” Usually, the flipper is a line of text at the...
labette n.— «The center is envisioned as a “labette,” a little laboratory, that will examine whether the old way of telling stories—particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end—is in...