Someone who “looks like the wreck of Hesperus” isn’t exactly looking their best. The idiom comes from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, inspired by an 1839 blizzard off the coast of Massachusetts that destroyed 20 ships. This is part of a complete...
For 341 years, the poets laureate of Britain have all been male. That just changed with the appointment of Britain’s new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has been described as “dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest minutiae of...
“You look like the wreck of the Hesperus!” It means you look “disheveled, ragged, dirty, hung over, or otherwise less than your best.” It may sound like an odd phrase, but it made perfect sense to generations of schoolchildren familiar with this...
disponering n.— «I, for my own female brain, didn’t realize that Filipino innovations could lead to the fixing of cars or in layman’s term “disponering.”…I found out later that the car is a wreck he brought from the surplus, not his personal car as...
Data Valdez n.— «Information brokers and the public now find themselves in a highly publicized pickle, Homeland Security Dept. privacy chief Nuala O’Connor Kelly said, likening data spills to oil or chemical spills in their capacity to wreck lives...
reef v.— «The suspension seems very stiff to me…and the adjuster turns with no resistance, about 4 or 5 turns, then seems to bottom out and not turn any firther (I haven’t tried really reefing on it yet…I don’t want to wreck anything on this...
