What’s the origin of the word nerd, referring to “an unfashionable person”? Does it come from Dr. Seuss’s book If I Ran the Zoo? (Amazon). Incidentally, a nerdle is a dollop of toothpaste on a toothbrush. Sometimes spelled...
At Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, students use snack for an attractive person: someone who looks like a good snack. A step up from that is whole meal, for someone even more appealing. Snack in this sense is fairly widespread in the United...
News reports that the makers of Scrabble were changing the rules to allow proper names left some purists fuming. The rumors were false, but they got Grant thinking about idiosyncratic adaptations of the game’s rules. Also this week, the...
Charlie, an SAT prep teacher in Santa Cruz, California, reports that local high-schoolers are using legit not just in the older sense of “genuine” or “acceptable,” but to mean “cool”: That’s legit. One student even uses it as a stand-in for an...
trep n.— «She also owns Dream Wings, a nearly 2-year-old company she started with her mother that raises and sells butterflies for weddings and parties. That’s the “trep” side of Kassidy—teen-age slang for “entrepreneur...