It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
Sam from St. Paul, Minnesota, says his dad often used the expressions Do you think I just fell off the turnip truck? and I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, meaning “I’m not naive” or “Do you think I was born...
zap n.— «Following the 1969 Stonewall riots, as the nascent gay rights movement became increasingly combative, a gay Philadelphia teenager initiated his own guerrilla war aimed at television, including the CBS Evening News. Mark Segal...
there guitar n.— «Tonight one of Conan’s guests was perennial air guitar contest runner-up, Bjorn Turock (sp?). In the course of the interview, Bjorn bristled at Conan’s inquiry as to what air guitarists call “real” guitars...
weather war n.— «In the States, they have a name for the media’s increasingly demented obsession with meteorological phenomena: “weather wars.” Anyone who has watched a US reporter narrowly avoid being blown off a rain-lashed...
corpsing n.— «It’s been known that old hands like Mulholland and Rex Garner will try to make fellow cast members crack up laughing, or corpsing as it is known in the theatre, but it has never worked on her.» —“Unexpected Guest from...