Month: March 2006
Searching Margaritaville for the Perfect Key Lime Pie
Wrong! If it doesn’t have a graham cracker crust, it’s not Key lime pie. I don’t care which wet rock you live on.
Getting Beyond the Language Question Re-runs
Anatoly Liberman makes an excellent point in this week’s “Oxford Etymologist” column: Another post suggested that I temper my enthusiasm, because people are allegedly interested not in etymology, but in “words and slang; they ask about posh or the whole nine yards. They’d see no point in asking for etymologies of water, wind, wool, winter,…
BBC World Service Shortwave Slowly Disappearing
It saddens me to see that the BBC has further reduced its shortwave broadcasting schedule. While it’s true that I listen exclusively online these days, I’ve always counted on having the World Service at 5975 KHz as a backup. That’s the frequency where I first started listening to the BBC regularly in 1983. I credit…
The Sudoku Code
I met Francis Heaney a couple of times at my kind of parties—where I’m the dumbest person in the room. He’s one of those puzzle league types and he’s just posted on his blog that he’s got a new book coming out: The Sudoku Code, with Frank Longo. The cover has the tagline “200 Sudoku…
Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang
Oxford University Press has just released the paperback version of my Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, originally issued in hardback in 2004. James Carville and Mary Matalin wrote the foreword.
WTOP FM 103.5, Washington, D.C.
WTOP FM, an FM news-talk radio station in Washington, D.C., featured Double-Tongued in its drive-time today. WTOP Reporter Evan Haning sent me two different MP3s of the news story: version 1 (34 sec., 544K), version 2 (36 sec., 572K). There’s also a full-text version.
New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
I finally received a copy of the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. It’s a brand-new two-volume dictionary, edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, building off the work of Eric Partridge and concentrating on new world-wide Anglophone slang since 1945. At some point in the next few weeks I’ll do a review…
Tearing Down the Brooklyn Bridge
You know, if you choose to misunderstand this cutline from the New York Times, you can let yourself believe they’re tearing down the Brooklyn Bridge: The Purchase Building, a little Art Moderne structure under the Brooklyn Bridge whose razing was recently approved.
Fedders House
Today the New York Times, in a story about the “Fedders’ Curse,” linked to DTWW for its Fedders house entry.
Ha-ha
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, a ha-ha is “a ditch with a wall on its inner side below ground level, forming a boundary to a park or garden without interrupting the view.” I did not know that.