An Episcopal priest in Toledo worries that her sermons are cluttered with dashes. This works just fine when she’s preaching, but when the same text appears on her church’s website, it looks like a messy tangle of words and punctuation...
needlex
n.—Gloss: A needle exchange program. «Liverpool did not have the world’s first needlex.» —“Needle Exchange in the USA” by Maias Metafilter Aug. 16, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Favorite online reading. If the subjunctive tense were to disappear from English, would anybody care? And just in time for this romantic weekend, a caller discovers the meaning of…lurve. That’s L-U-R-V-E.
brain gang n.— «A few years ago, Netflix offered a million dollars to anyone out there who could design a system to improve their system of rating DVDs by 10 percent. 17,000 submissions came in from the public. Dell Computers, once almost...
Cleave, dust, and screen are all words that can mean the opposite of themselves. You can cleave to a belief, meaning to “adhere closely,” but you can also separate things by cleaving them. Words that mean the opposite of themselves go by...
triple n.— «Who is Bill Clinton’s wife? What’s the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears’ mother’s name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the...