zap
n.— «Following the 1969 Stonewall riots, as the nascent gay rights movement became increasingly combative, a gay Philadelphia teenager initiated his own guerrilla war aimed at television, including the CBS Evening News. Mark Segal, 19, became angry when he and a male friend were thrown out of a television dance program in 1972 after the program’s host saw them dancing together. A few days later, Segal barged into the studio of Philadelphia’s WPVI during its evening newscast. Startled studio personnel wrestled him to the floor and called the police. Segal became a walking terror with his “zaps,” as they were called. In 1973, his targets included The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Mike Douglas Show. He and a friend staged their last and most notorious zap when they posed as college students and obtained passes for the CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite.» —“How Do You Turn Walter Cronkite Into a Friend of Gay Rights? Zap Him.” by Edward Alwood Washington Post July 26, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
A Kentucky listener says her father often prefaced statements with the phrase I tell you what’s the truth. This regionalism appears in the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Bookshop|Amazon). A shorter version is I’ll tell you...