wobble
n.— «How could WHUR (96.3 FM)—a station that played essentially the same type of music, had the same on-air personalities and didn’t undertake any special audience-building promotions during the spring—surge so far, so fast? WHUR’s ratings increase has all the makings of what radio people like to call a “wobble,” a freakish, one-time aberration caused by Arbitron’s increasingly creaky data-collection methods.» —“Survey Method Questioned as WHUR Surges” by Paul Farhi Washington Post July 25, 2008. (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...
Why is it harder to talk if we don’t move our hands? Even when we’re talking on the phone we feel the need to gesture to aid communication. A new book offers a look at the relatively new field of gesture studies. And: Ever wonder why we describe the...