Wordwizard

I like "The bowl is chipped." No muss no fuss!
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Ken Greenwald - November 4, 2018

A most unfortunate disappointment!
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Ken Greenwald - November 3, 2018

‘Incel’ and ‘incel’ are relatively new words which I had never heard before: <2018 “Whether expressed in right-wing, left-wing, jihadist, or black nationalist ideological terms, today’s acts of political violence share a common lineage in the above mixture and together have resulted in almost 200 de...

pie-hole or piehole or pie hole [[slang]] is your mouth and it is commonly used in the expression “Shut your pie-hole.” ___________________________________________ writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary Shut your pie-hole : Shut up. Origin of Shut Your Pie Hole : Shut your cake hole came first, and ...

John, I agree with you. i If I saw "“Calhoon’s Tour Hypoed by Hollywood“ without knowing they were trying to promote the tour, I would infer it might mean "panned by Hollywood" since the prefix "hypo' means below, beneath, under, less than normal, deficient. However, as you pointed out and American ...

<2018 “At a time when literary convention favors novelists who write narrowly about personal experience, Power’s ambit is refreshingly unfashionable, restoring to the form an authority it has shirked.”— The Atlantic , June, page 32> ‘Ambit’ is a small word with useful meaning, I like it, and I was ...

John,

Interesting observation: betide / be tied. Who would have thunk? Damn the English language!
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Ken Greenwald - September 29, 2018

<2018 “In Skaife’s [[author of The Ravenemaster : My Life With the Ravens at the Tower of London]] telling, the shifting social structure of his ravens plays out like a nail-bittingly intense soap opera, and woe betide the handler who can’t keep up.”— The Atlantic , October, page 43> Since the expr...

A grill.

<2018 “That the dinosaur wars drew in scientists from multiple disciplines only added to the bad blood. Paleontologists resented arriviste physicists, like Alvarez for ignoring their data. Physicists figured the stamp collectors [[derogatory expression for paleontologists]] were just bitter because...

I really like this expression and I just came across it in my reading. I would note that it is often used in the hyphenated form dead-cat bounce . <2018 “The promise of the rainbow coalition thus seems ever closer to fruition. Among true believers, every liberal defeat, up to and including the 2016 ...

<2018 “You gave up the privacy of your personal data a long time ago, said Ian Bogost in TheAtlantic.com. Everything you’ve done, online and off, has been ‘recorded, munged , and spat back at you to benefit sellers, advertisers, and the brokers who service them.’”— The Week , 7 September, page 19> ...

<2018 “The Hudson Institute has promoted programs examining the rise of kleptocracy in governments around the world, with Russia as a prime target.”— New York Times , 21 August> Never heard the word before and it’s not hard to infer it’s meaning, but I’ll include it anyway. Dictionary.com kleptocra...

How true .

Ken - April 24, 2018

<“We are all now living in President Trump’s ‘ kayfabe ' [[ Los Angeles Times ]] . . . That’s a term from professional wrestling and ‘means presenting staged events as if they were real.’ Just as pro wrestlers stage colorful fake fights, Trump specializes in conjuring up illusions, or kayfabe , tha...