Category: Uncategorized
Mark Peters on cars
Mark Peters has collected a few unusual car-related words for Grist magazine, including a couple of terms from Double-Tongued, which has an automotive category.
Submarine escape
Cool post about training to escape a submarine. It came up in my searches for slang because it contains the word “bubblehead.”
Damien and Cam try out for a game show
My pals Damien and Cameron Barrett tried out for the Howie Mandel game show Deal or No Deal. I know them both through the wonders of the intarweb. We always joke about me being their third twin: They’re twins, so am I; our last names are the same; and we’re all three big computer geeks.
Bump
William Safire writes in his “On Language” column in the New York Times this week: “You can find a variety of senses for the word bump in our leading dictionaries.…But the sense that lexicographers are slow in recording is racing through our vocabulary, filling a word void. What term do we use today for the…
Crank
In researching the entry for Jenny Crank the other day, I found a great example of what a bad contextual advertising algorithm looks like: Crank is a well-established slang term for methamphetamine.
Memo to Boss: Time to Re-Pot and Re-Charge
Susan Walker sent me a note telling me that my entry for repot inspired her article at Fox News about making a career change.
Words I did not know
Each day I spend an hour or more hunting for words that have yet to be recorded in mainstream dictionaries. As I’ve written here before, I keep lists: besides the words I record on my site, Double-Tongued, I keep a list of words to consider for inclusion in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a…
Le P’tit Dico
Le P’tit Dico is a collection of difficult, contentious, or new words and phrases that might bring questions from the readers of Le Monde, the French newspaper. In French, of course.
Sapir-Whorf in a Fiji Advertisement
Totally stole this from Erin, who noticed this ad as we were walking along Fifth Avenue here in New York City and recognized it as representing an example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.