One of the things I learned this weekend (I can't remember who told me, but maybe the waiter at TS McHugh's) is that Rat City is a name for White Center, which is where the Rat City Roller Girls started out. White Center is a little working class town outside of Seattle that has a bit of a (no doubt classist) low rent reputation. The only reason I' ( Read more... )

Meanwhile on a discussion list a British emigre mentioned a phrase he heard from his mother when he was growing up, "san fairy ann," which meant that something was insignificant or meaningless, and he says it took him years to figure out it was from the French, "ça ne fait rien," probably brought back by his father after WWII. And if san fairy ann ( Read more... )

I never knew that "ortho" meant "correct". Thus "orthodoxy" means "correct belief". So "politically correct" could be understood as another way to say "orthodox", which is probably pretty close to how it was used in the Marxist-Leninist context, before it became a libertarian pejorative.

Whalezy deals and sealzy deals
And little shoxy doysters
A squidelly doysters too
Wouldn't you?

Via Lee Gold on trufen

... AGW -- anthropogenic global warning ...

(From Marc Ambinder's takedown of Sarah Palin's "Boycott Copenhagen" Op-Ed in the Washington Post.)

Cliff Mass has a blog post about the threat of flooding in the Green River and a couple of different approaches to trying to forecast the threat. What I found interesting about this post was a new term to me -- the lovely "atmospheric rivers," which is another term for what is popularly called a pineapple express in these parts -- and a color-coded ( Read more... )

I recently ran across the word "ferverent" on the intertubes. I looked it up in the online OED, which doesn't know of it, but if you Google it, you get a 63,000 hits (along with the query of whether you meant "fervent"). From what I can tell, it means the same thing as "fervent," but perhaps with added fever. (It seems to be associated with the ( Read more... )

So what does "make a fist of it" mean? I see this idiom in British English.

Years before Wells popularized the term "Scientific Romance," Bulwer-Lytton devised a narrative that he described as "perhaps a romance, but such a romance as a Scientific amateur might compose."

-- David Seed, Introduction to the Wesleyan University Press edition of Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race

[Rated] PG: for thematic elements, some sensuality, brief language and incidental smoking.

"Brief language" is a new one on me. Which language has the fewest words?