Fernando in San Antonio, Texas, is curious about the use of the term holiday to mean a space on a wall that’s been covered unevenly and requires repainting. This usage goes back to the shipbuilding industry of the 1700s, when workers tarring...
If you’ve got crummy handwriting, you might say that it looks like something written with a thumbnail dipped in tar. But go ahead, dip that thumbnail and write to us anyway. If you’ve got notable handwriting of any sort, we want to see...
Grant and Martha share more intentional mispronunciations, including tar-ZHAY instead of Target. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Target vs. Tar-Zhay” Martha, we were talking earlier about words that we mispronounce on...
voter-owned election n.— «The qualifying contributions mandate is a provision that is traditionally part of voter-owned elections, another name for publicly financed elections.» —“Sign petitions, not checks” in University...
air-sparaging n.— «Drilling began in 1995 for wells to be used in a process, called air-sparaging, to clean out the coal tar contaminants.» —“Coal-tar cleanup took 20 years” by Mark Simonson Daily Star (Oneonta...
tar-tar n.— Note: “Toi toi” is a type of grass native to New Zealand, as described here, although there is at least one species of bird native to the country, the North Island tomtit, that is of the subspecies “toitoi...