In his delightful memoir Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Bookshop|Amazon), Christian Cooper introduces the vocabulary of birding, including the term warbler neck, an affliction among fellow birders. Cooper...
Think you know Downton Abbey? Try using the Up-Goer Five Text Editor to describe the plot using the thousand most common words in English! Your description probably won’t sound much like the Dowager Countess. This is part of a complete episode...
Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? (Or a jaboney, jadroney, jambone, jiboney, gibroni, gibroney, gabroney, jobroni, jobrone, etc.) This playful insult, meaning a “rube” or “loser,” traces to the 1920s, when Italian...
It’s always fun to catch moviemakers’ blunders. Say you’re watching an epic about ancient Rome and spot a toga-clad extra who forgot to remove his wristwatch. That’s an anachronism. But what do you call something that’s...
Making money hand over fist evokes the motion of hauling in a rope quickly, one hand passing over the other and closing into a fist. Betsy in Connecticut heard the phrase at dinner, where her daughters guessed it might come from the baseball-bat...
Infracaninophile means a lover or helper of the underdog, a word Kate in Evansville, Indiana, remembered from graduate school in social work. Its parts are nicely transparent: infra-, under, canino, dog, and -phile, lover. As far as anyone can tell...
