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What are Good Terms for Old People?

Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, wonders when words like senior and senior citizen came to mean “elderly.” Senior comes from Latin senex, “old,” the source also of Senate and senile. In the 1930s, a politician helped popularize...

Gnarly Foot

It’s the Up Goer Five Challenge! Try to describe something complex using only the thousand most common words in English. It’s a useful mental exercise that’s harder than you might think. Also, if you want to make a room dark, you...

Desgundes

A college senior has invented a word to describe that anxiety we feel when there’s unfinished work looming over us. He calls it desgundes. As in, “that twenty-year-old in the library making a three-foot boondoggle must likely be dealing...

Victory Lap

A fifth-year senior? That term is so 2007. These days, college students just refer to that extra year of school as taking a victory lap. Grant shares this and other examples of campus slang collected by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill...

howdy process

howdy process  n.— «Vivian, who arrived at the old Central Texas Zoo in 1966 as a teenager from the wild, had literally bitten the heads off two previous suitors. But the third time was the charm: Vivian reacted well during the “howdy”...

DISCO

DISCO  n.— «Senior officials of different power distribution companies (DISCOs) also termed the current loadshedding unprecedented, especially in rural areas, and said the present shortage was a catastrophe in Pepco’s history...

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