Martin, who lives in San Diego, California, shares some of his favorite surfing slang, including A-frame, boosting, and gnar. He’s curious about the use of gangbusters in filmmaker Bruce Brown’s surfing classic The Endless Summer 2 to...
Martha reports that, during her recent attempt at learning to surf, she picked up lots of surfing lingo in between wipeouts. Such terms included tombstoning and pearling, both of which she did quite a bit. This is part of a complete episode.
Ahoy! We kicked off the new fall season of "A Way with Words" this weekend, asking, "How much humor and personality can you pack into a 140-character update? A lot, it seems. We discuss funny Twitter feeds, the origins of...
In this week’s slang quiz, a member of the National Puzzlers’ League from Somerville, Massachusetts, tries to guess the meaning of bottle room and shred, the latter as used in the context of snowboarding, skateboarding, and surfing. This...
city-it n.— «Some local surfers complained last week that publicity for the new surfing beach would attract a large influx of city-its (rhymes with idiots), a local term for neophyte surfers from Manhattan.» —“Sand, Surf, and...
mouse type n.—Gloss: Defined in the Dictionary for Library and Information Science as “very tiny, barely readable type used for…information the seller is required to display but wishes to downplay.” «Charter is taking...