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...
The word mermaid shares a common linguistic ancestor with several salty words, including marine, maritime, marinate, and the Spanish word for “ocean,” mar. The Netflix documentary MerPeople, directed by Oscar recipient Cynthia Wade, is a remarkable...
As a Wyoming caller noted in an earlier episode, through-hikers on routes like the Appalachian Trail give each other trail names — jocular appellations that stick throughout their trek. The origin stories of several of these are told in the book...
If your name is too difficult for the employees at Starbucks to accurately write on the side of a coffee cup, we suggest you take on a coffee-nym. Can’t go wrong with Elvis. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Coffee-nyms” It seems...
What is a hipster? Is it an insult to call someone a hipster, even if they’re, well, a hipster? Do hipsters identify themselves as hipsters? Grant traces the label from 1960s counterculture to today’s skinny-jeaned Brooklyn paradox. This is part of...
