Welcome to another newsletter from A Way with Words. We've got cheese! It was our second week in a row talking about the books of David Crystal. (He deserves it!) This time, we plunged into the rich pages of his book "As They Say in...
hydromowing n.— «The local agencies use three approaches to curbing fire threat—prescribed burning, hand thinning and a relatively new practice known as hydromowing, where a large spinning drum with carbide teeth shreds small trees and...
run one’s pockets v. phr.— «The man asked Cooper for a cigarette, and when Cooper said no, the man told him to “run your pockets,” which is street lingo for “give me your money.” Cooper grabbed the gun, pushed the man to the ground and...
sweatbox n.— «What will happen when they do have to pay it back includes nonstop calls to them and their parents. Credit card collection agencies know how to harass, threaten and then sweet-talk cardholders who are late. They even have a...
FOD n.— «In aviation parlance, “FOD,” or foreign object debris, can be sucked into jet engines or slice through the thin aluminum skins of aircraft, potentially setting off catastrophic fuel-tank explosions.» —“Airports...
strangelet n.— «But Wagner and Sancho’s court papers raise theoretical scenarios in which the LHC could create particles that gobble up the Earth, such as “killer strangelets.” Strangelets are hypothetical blobs of matter...