A Bay Area listener says she always giggles when she sees a sign in the Oakland airport that reads, “You are leaving a sterile area.” Among security experts, the term sterile specifically means an area that is officially under control and clear of...
An insurance fraud investigator in Milwaukee wonders if he’s correct to use a semicolon immediately after the word “however.” Grant suggests that the word and the punctuation mark should do a do-si-do. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...
lecherscope n.— «The absence of women was a severe trial, and several home-made telescopes—or “lecherscopes,” as they were called—were assembled in the hope that an unflagging surveillance of the windows of the village houses might prove rewarding...
cellblock n.— «Pulled off the streets, stripped of guns and badges, kept inside four walls and away—as much as possible—from the public, officers who are put on desk duty because their conduct is under investigation find themselves far from the...
air breather n.— «Hundreds of American support personnel members on the ground in Colombia complemented these elite forces, in addition to a frenzied intelligence-gathering operation located in the United States Embassy here, drawing on intercepts...
dicker n.— Note: Related to dick ‘to watch or to keep under surveillance.’ «It’s a well known Taliban tactic to use what the Marines call “Dickers” (spotters) to monitor their patrols and choose if and when to attack, usually in very short burst of...
