In 1975, Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Amazon|Bookshop). A few years later, she wrote an essay in The New York Times with advice for writers and artists, calling on them to observe...
A.J. Jacobs’ book The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life is a delightful celebration of the history and lure of all kinds of puzzles and puzzlers, from...
Why do we describe someone or something very special as all that and a bag of chips? It’s an intensifier of the expression all that and appears to have been popularized by a 1991 newspaper story about new slang, playing off the earlier...
A Dallas man says his grandmother used to carry around washcloth a plastic bag in her purse. When he and his siblings would get their hands dirty, she’d say to them, “Show me your paddywackers,” and they’d hold out their...
tank n.— «The caddies work six days a week, assigned at “the bench” above Sankaty’s parking lot. Carrying one bag—a tank in camp parlance—nets $70, in addition to a tip that averages about $20.» —“At Camp Sankaty Head, Young Caddies...
in the bag other.— «After a year training at Burnham Military Camp and in Egypt, he found himself in Crete and “in the bag,” as they called it, a prisoner of war on a bitter journey to the “hell camp” in Germany...
