Taig
n.— «In Northern Ireland during the 1980s the paramilitaries engaged in tit-for-tat shootings, these days the guns are largely silent but these self-imposed community representatives are engaged in tit-for-tat culture-making, and culture is all the worse for it. “The taigs get a couple of grand for basket-weaving in Irish? We want cash for women’s mural-painting in Ulster Scots.”» —“Lexicon of Illiteracy” by Jason Walsh Zerovis (Belfast, Northern Ireland) May 1, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...