sorry gift n.— «Because guilt over spending is playing a big role in the sales downturn, he teaches salespeople to suggest a “sorry gift”—of another timepiece—for a wife who might be disappointed that her husband just dropped a sizable...
Grab some popcorn, slip into a folding seat, and you’re ready to watch the coming attractions. But if they’re shown before the main feature, why in the world are movie previews called trailers? Enjoy these old movie trailers at Turner...
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.
Hey! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words," which this week was called "entertainingly erudite" by William Safire in the New York Times. Suh-weet! Our latest erudition came in the form of talk about "apple...
kitchen sink-it v. phr.—Gloss: To report the worst financial performance possible. «In a note to clients yesterday, Credit Suisse analyst Thomas Gallagher said that although the number seems high, it is “plausible, especially if AIG...
Here’s a riddle: “Nature requires five, custom gives seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven.” Think you know the answer? You’ll find it in this week’s episode, in which Grant and Martha discuss this and other...