Language from inside a monastery. A Benedictine monk shares terms from his world: For example, corporate prayer refers to praying as a group, not urging shares to return dividends. And did you know there’s a term of art for those annoying add...
Allyn from North Dallas, Texas, who hosts a YouTube show about knitting called Sal & Al: The Woolslayers, emails the show to share some favorite slang used by knitters. LYS stands for one’s Local Yarn Shop, as opposed to a big-box store...
Among knitters, SABLE is an acronym for “Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy,” a joking reference to “a supply of yarn so huge that there’s no way you could possibly knit it all before you die.” This is part of a...
All wool and a yard wide means “reliable and trustworthy.” The phrase was part of advertisements in the late 19th century, touting material produced by textile mills that wasn’t shoddy, which meant it was not made from the shredded...
Before a clue was a hint, a clew (or clewe) was a ball of yarn. In one of history’s greatest stories about yarn, Theseus famously made it back out of the deadly Minotaur’s labyrinth by unspooling a ball of yarn so he could retrace his steps...
Katie in Boston, who grew up near Buffalo, knew the plastic-string camp craft as boondoggle, while friends in Boston called the material or activity gimp and others called it lanyard. Boondoggle appears to have arisen in scouting near Rochester, New...