red
n.— «He extended his stop sign, the bus’s red lights started flashing, and its interior lights turned on. As a 10th-grade boy started to cross the road, a silver sports utility vehicle came screaming by. The young man jumped out of the way just in time.…This sort of thing happens all too often. Bus drivers refer to the phenomenon as “running their reds.”… The number of drivers who run reds is likely even worse than statistics suggest.…To make this task easier, officials at Pocono Mountain School District put forms in all its buses, so that drivers can track information on the scofflaws who run reds.» —“Bus drivers seeing red as speeders ignore warning lights” by Dan Berrett Pocono Record (Pennsylvania) Jan. 7, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Spicy Jambalaya 06/18/2018: Teen slang from the South, and food words that are tricky to pronounce. • High schoolers in Huntsville, Alabama, told Martha and Grant about their... [more]
Chopped Liver 06/10/2018: There's a proverb that goes "beloved children have many names." At least, that's true when it comes to the names we give our pets. "Fluffy"... [more]
Busted Melon 06/02/2018: When writing textbooks about slavery, which words best reflect its cold, hard reality? Some historians are dropping the word slave in favor of terms like... [more]
Truth and Beauty 05/28/2018: Malamute, kayak, and parka are just some of the words that have found their way into English from the language of indigenous people in northern... [more]
Jump Steady 05/19/2018: To transmit information during wartime, various industries used to encode their messages letter by letter with an elaborate system--a primitive version of today's digital encryption.... [more]
You must log in to post a comment.