turk
v.— «For fees ranging from dollars to single pennies per task, workers, who cheekily call themselves “turkers,” do tasks that may be rote, like matching a color to a photograph, but they can confound a computer. Conceived to help Amazon improve its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace.…Curtis Taylor, 50, a corporate trainer in Clarksville, Ind., who has earned more than $345 on Mturk.com, doesn’t even think of turking as work.…He doesn’t like to watch TV much, and says that turking beats playing free online poker.…Eric Cranston, 18, who recently graduated from high school, got into turking because at the time he didn’t have anything better to do.» —“I make $1.45 a week and I love it” by Katharine Mieszkowski Salon July 24, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
“What has a head like a cat, feet like a cat, a tail like a cat, but isn’t a cat?” Answer: a kitten! A 1948 children’s joke book has lots of these to share with kids. Plus: an easy explanation for the difference between...