A native Japanese speaker is mystified by the expression “happy as a clam.” In Japanese, she says, if you had a good night’s sleep you might say you “slept like a clam” or “slept like mud.” So why do English...
cashed-up adj.—Gloss: Having a lot of money. «Another speaker at the summit, futurist Ross Honeywill, points out that boomers or the “cashed-up and cranky,” as he calls them are active and immediate holiday-takers, with half...
voice writing n.— «In the US, court reporters have abandoned stenotype machines, whose keyboards use chord-like combinations to represent sounds, for a technique called voice writing. The “writer”—really a speaker—repeats...
fitting the flaps n.— «Lip Synchronisation, known in America as “fitting the flaps,” is a means of ensuring that the sound of the words being spoken matched the lip movements of the onscreen speaker.» —“Lost in...
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.
carabao English n.— «Whenever you hear a non-native English speaker, a Filipino specifically, uttering broken “carabao” English, or a version you are not used to hearing, please reserve your criticism.» —“World has more...