Shuba in Sammamish, Washington, grew up in India, where she heard speakers of Indian English refer to an eggplant as a brinjal. She assumed that this was a British English term, but later realized that in Britain, this vegetable is called an...
Beware of false friends, those words that don’t translate the way you’d expect. For example, the word “gift” in German means “poison,” and the Spanish word “tuna” means “the fruit of the prickly...
biobigotry n.— «Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can hurt or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or to fend off traditional household pests like mice and roaches. Rather, it is the...
social dumping n.— «A further risk is that disgruntled incumbent suppliers might retaliate by introducing some form of poison pill such as a special bonus payment—a hit that the new supplier will have to take. They have also been known to...
poison put n.— «In December 1995, following several quarters of weak sales, Kmart Corp. came on the brink of a bankruptcy filing: Their problems stemmed from the possible exercise of $550 million of poison put bonds outstanding, which...
shack-wacky
adj.— «“Poison Pinky,” it was agreed, had gone “shack-wacky.”» —by Edith Kneipple Roberts Tamarack , 1940. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)