Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a sensuous, exhilarating meditation about the strangeness of life on a space station, with its mix of tedious tasks and jaw-dropping views. And: a musician who rode the rails in his youth shares the slang he...
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
ski cutting n.— «On Monday, the injured man and a partner were doing what is called “ski cutting,” which is a daily procedure at the resort. Cutting first involves the ski patrol testing the slope to check avalanche...
sweet spot n.— «Like the snowflakes that fall on the mountain, no two days are alike in the avalanche-control business.…The explosives come in two forms.…The method of delivery depends on the accessibility of the “sweet...