A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.
The second edition of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus is chock-full of synonyms, of course, but what makes it special are the essays and usage notes by authors such as Simon Winchester, David Lehman, Zadie Smith, and David Foster...
bean-bag genetics n.— «As Robert Brandon famously stated, genes are invisible to selection. Yet, population genetics assumes that the genes are visible to selection. How? Via phenotypes. But that is an oversimplified notion that a...
showup n.— «Benjamin Valentin picked Carmelo Herrera out of a lineup that contained only one suspect.…Writing for the majority, Justice John Wallace said such a one-on-one identification—known in police parlance as a...
four-walling v.— «In Vegas parlance, Wallace is a “four-waller,” the term used when an entertainer pays for his or her stage time. It’s an increasingly common arrangement that guarantees the hotel or casino rent and puts much...
four-waller n.— «In Vegas parlance, Wallace is a “four-waller,” the term used when an entertainer pays for his or her stage time. It’s an increasingly common arrangement that guarantees the hotel or casino rent and puts much...