Latest spam subject lines
My favorite spam subject lines of the day: First: the social networking site no one else knows about Now I want to generalize that to a sort of a game:...
o’clock
I recently encountered the phrase pattern "[activity noun x] o'clock" meaning "it's time to do x": once as "sex o'clock" (link is not work-safe), once as "pray o'clock" (in an...
cold turkey
Twig asked me about the origin of the phrase "cold turkey." I didn't know, so I looked it up. No info at Quinion's World Wide Words, which is my most...
Months and movies
I stopped by Netflix today, and the system recommended two movies that had titles with month names in them. So here's today's challenge: come up with a set of twelve...
News Mondegreen
Was half-listening to NPR news this morning, and thought I heard a reporter say that something was intended to "shore up the Gaza sea-spire." I thought to myself, "Neat--I don't...
Is it a real word?
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks with OED editor Jesse Sheidlower about whether "conversate" is a word. I And dictionary editors in general. Lexicographer Erin McKean gave a talk at TED in 2007...
Cute tees
Happened across the BustedTees T-shirt company the other day. (Run by the CollegeHumor.com people.) Most of the T-shirt companies I see have a bunch of crass, obnoxious, racist, sexist, and...
nibling, niephling, niefling, etc
In honor of my new niephling Avery: A few years back, Arthur E introduced me to the word "niephling," a gender-neutral word for nieces and nephews. Most useful when the...
Online Encore
Are y'all familiar with the game "Encore"? There's a boardgame version of it, but I first encountered it as a parlor game (not sure which version came first), in which...
Cherubim, Seraphim, and otherim
Something I've been seeing unusually often lately: use of "-im" words as singular. The "-im" suffix, in words derived from Hebrew, is generally a masculine plural, as far as I...