In the acclaimed podcast S-town, journalist Brian Reed notes that sundials often bear haunting inscriptions about the brevity of life and the passage of time. Some 1,682 of them are collected in The Book of Sun-Dials, originally published in 1872 by...
The French word for “now,” maintenant, goes back to Latin manu tenendo, which literally refers to the idea of holding something in one’s hand. Over time, that expression also came to mean something that is “at hand” or “immediate.” The English term...
chitting n.— «Then sprout the potatoes before you plant them. This time-honored process, known as “chitting,” gives them a head start and often increases your eventual yield.» —“How to Spur On Early Spuds” by Barbara Damrosch Washington Post Feb...
ice out v. phr.— «The people who develop rivalries in the Obamaland? They don’t do so good. You may not have noticed that during the course of the campaign. But people who are shooting at each other? They tend to get iced out,” Podesta told me...
skimming n.— «The last step in processing is the separation of data into different streams based on the event types apparent in each collision. This process, called skimming, was performed at the computing centers—SLAC, GridKa in Germany, and RAL...
extinction n.— «But the thing is, as Natasha points out, the language of the slot machine industry belies its ultimate aims. There’s a term bandied about at the trade shows: “extinction.” We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to...
