When your server brings food to the table and inquires as to who ordered which dish, that’s informally known in the restaurant biz as auctioning. If your meal is delayed because the person who took your order forgot about it, that’s called a pocket...
Among London cabbies, a musher is somebody who owns their own cab, a starving musher is someone still paying for their cab, and musher’s lotion is rain. The book Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages (Bookshop|Amazon), writer Ben...
In deafening industrial workplaces, such as textile factories and sawmills, workers often develop their own elaborate system of sign language, communicating everything from how their weekend went or to straighten up because the boss is coming. This...
By the way, if you want to read about more family words, check out Paul Dickson’s book, Family Words: A Dictionary of the Secret Language of Families. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Dictionary of Family Words” Grant, here’s an...
NOC n.— «Barnes is a neophyte agent, an ex-doctoral candidate in Ottoman history, trained as a case officer under nonofficial cover, “known in the secret language of the club as NOC. As in: knock on wood.” Naive and idealistic, she was “afflicted...
