Cowpies, horse biscuits, buffalo chips, horse dumplings — why do so many names for animal droppings have to do with food? A caller wonders this, and whether the term cowpie would be an anachronism in a Civil War novel. This is part of a complete...
“You knucklehead!” Where’d we get an epithet like that? Grant tells the story about the wartime cartoon that helped popularize the term. Check out the adventures of R.F. Knucklehead in LIFE magazine. More about cartoons used for...
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...
snorage n.— Note: A derogatory play off of the word “storage,” referring to digital data storage devices. «Such a bidding war brings some unaccustomed excitement to what has been referred to as the “snorage” market...
in the bag other.— «After a year training at Burnham Military Camp and in Egypt, he found himself in Crete and “in the bag,” as they called it, a prisoner of war on a bitter journey to the “hell camp” in Germany...
reset button n.— «Colin Powell put it well when he said that the 9-11 attacks “set the reset button” on U.S. foreign and military policies. This restructuring of the global disorder predated 9-11.» —“Bush’s War: Where is...