The language and melodies of military marching songs connect grown children with their parents who served, as do parents’ love letters from World War II. Plus, “running a sandy” describes an awkward love triangle and Northern Spy...
Say you have an acquaintance you always see at the dog park or the playground. But one night, you run into them at the movies, and for a moment, it’s confusing. Is there a word for that disorienting sense of someone or something being out of...
In kayakers’ slang, a park and play is a part of a river where you park your vehicle closer to a river and enter the water to paddle around a particular water feature, then paddle back to your launch spot rather than continue downstream. If...
In Washington, DC, National Park Service employees refer to Ford’s Theater as FOTH, Peterson House as PEHO, and the Washington Monument as WAMO. This is part of a complete episode.
Latin phrases are commonly misused, but there’s perhaps no better example than Vampire Butters’ butchering of per se, which simply means “in itself,” in this episode of South Park. This is part of a complete episode.
The 2011 words of the year list wouldn’t be complete without occupy, as in the Occupy protests that sprang up in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. And Zuccotti lung? It’s an illness that made its rounds among the camped-out...