Words & Stuff

Apparently "double-gaited" means "bisexual," according to Chapman's American Slang. I encountered it in a 1981 Elmore Leonard novel: "[...] Yeah, I think he's fucking her. I think he'd be out...

A "junglist" is someone who listens to jungle, of course. Turns out that "jungle" is "a style of electronic music that incorporates influences from genres including breakbeat hardcore, techno, rare...

A recent Doonesbury strip used the phrase "hit the hustings." Turns out that (says Wikipedia) a "husting" is "the platform from which a candidate speaks before a parliamentary or other...

I'm cheating a little, 'cause I may have heard the word "flâneur" before; but it came up twice in unrelated contexts on the same day, a month or so back,...

A "flokati rug," also known as a "flokati," is a particular kind of Greek rug, according to MW11....

An "Uncle Mary" is, I gather, a gay man who works against the cause of gay rights, or who's seen as kowtowing to an anti-gay agenda. Wayne Besen's column/blog entry...

Promession is a new approach to the old issue of what to do with a corpse: it involves freezing the body in liquid nitrogen, then "placing it on a vibrating...

I thought I knew what a nit was (it's one of those things I'm always picking, right?), but it turns out there's another meaning: it's a unit of brightness, equal...

I mentioned this in a comment in my main journal, but I figure it's worth recording here as well. The Clancy Brothers recorded an Ewan MacColl song, "Shoals of Herring,"...