The books we love as children may influence our careers more than we realize. As a child, Martha was fascinated with stories of cracking codes, and Grant loved books with glossaries–not that far from the kind of work they do today. A caller...
Callum at UC Irvine grew up with baffies, the family word for rounded, heeled morning slippers, and later found that friends didn’t recognize it. The singular is baffy, and in Scotland baff can mean a bedroom slipper. The word came through Callum’s...
Margarita from the Dallas area uses anyhow and anyways when she has finished saying something personal and wants to move on. These informal words can function as discourse markers, signaling a transition or wrapping up a thought, though anyways in...
You dream of writing the great American novel, but to make ends meet, you spend your days writing boring corporate reports. There’s a difference between writing for love and writing for a living — or is there? Does a heyday have anything to do...
gayby n.— «In 1994, Daddy Dave and Daddy Bob prepared 5-year-old Elizabeth Wall for the first day of kindergarten in New Jersey, meeting with the principal in advance to ease her transition as the daughter of two gay men. […] Wall...
drugs ‘n’ thugs n.— «Rand Beers, a Foreign Service officer who handled intelligence, counterterrorism and peacekeeping issues on the National Security Council and was later assistant secretary of state for International...