Ship gender
It's traditional in English to refer to ships using female pronouns. I've known that all my life, but I think this is the first time I've consciously noticed a case...
Gorilla gorilla
I'm pretty sure that I already knew that the Western Gorilla has the taxonomic name Gorilla gorilla (genus + species). But I don't think I knew until now that the...
It never calls, it never writes
Headline today on the BBC website: Pope could make Birmingham visit Birmingham hasn't visited in months, and I was beginning to think it never would. So I'm pleased to see...
Variety slang
Variety has been using idiosyncratic and hyperbolic slang for about a hundred years now: ankle, biopic, boffo, chopsocky, helm, hoofer, nix, oater, percenter, scribbler, skein, sudser, terp, warble, whammo, yawner,...
Another pan
Another entertainingly harsh movie review: There's nothing wrong with "All About Steve" that a rewrite couldn't fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and...
go down a storm
Hadn't encountered this idiom before; apparently it means about the same thing as "go over well." (And not at all the same thing as "go down the storm drain.") I...
Acronyms in a song
A few weeks back, I heard a country song on the radio in which the singer sang: I smell T.R.O, you B.L.E. I puzzled for a while over what T.R.O....
attosecond
I know what an attosecond is. (It's 10-18 seconds.) What surprised me was seeing the word used metaphorically and in passing in a general-interest news article: Stress may be most...
monkey misreading
Just saw a spam subject line that said: MONEY OR LOVE? WHY NOT BOTH? Only at first glance I misread the first word, so I thought it said: MONKEY OR...
Ambiguous headline
AP headline this morning: Obama ventures back to hurting region _ with money I think that underscore was intended to be a dash, but either way, I initially read the...