Colin in West Hartford, Connecticut, says his teenagers admiringly use the word dirty to describe a great athlete, and use filthy to describe one who’s especially talented. Although this positive usage of originally negative words may sound new, both words have been used as intensifiers for well over 100 years. This is part of a complete episode.
Humpty-Bump Pull Top, Diamond Loop, Reverse Shark’s Tooth, Hammerhead, and Goldfish from the Top are all names of aerobatic maneuvers recorded in the Aresti System, designed by Spanish aviator Jose Luis de Aresti Aguirre as a means of...
If you reeeeeeeeeally want to emphasize something in writing, you can engage in what linguists call expressive lengthening, or making a word longer by repeating letters. It’s an example of paralinguistic restitution — rendering in text...
