Search for the impossible
Filed under Catchword Summary • Language and Languages • (0) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
My latest column for the Malaysian Star appeared today. This one is about words associated with hazing, especially the kind of hazing that sends newbies to go look for things that don’t exist: type lice, italic spaces, a left-handed monkey wrench, a left-handed hammer, buckets of steam, bags of electricity, wheelbarrow seed, and fifty feet of shoreline.
This is the personal weblog of Grant Barrett, editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a collection of words from the fringes of English. More about this site...
Recent Entries
- A hearty endorsement of shout quotes: scare quotes used for emphasis
- How to buy a dictionary
- Jinx and padiddle: games we play
- Saying it wrong on purpose
- Nicknames from the Underground: Busharraf, Chillary, and Killadelphia
- New slang unpacked
- UPDATED: Crosswords in Black and White
- Find me in American Way Magazine
- Recent catchwords: read-alike, violin hickey, throw a Porsche at someone, Q-tip cruise, 1-800 car
- The Tell-All of the Century: Snitching Slang
- Fog line, instant ancestor, trashout
- See, ya kid: saying goodbye in slang
- Interview with British slang lexicographer Jonathon Green
- New Scientist: “Word nerds capture fleeting online English”
- The blueprints of a Craigslist apartment scam
Recent Catchwords
- park v. (5/16)
- whale eye n. (5/16)
- water buffalo n. (5/16)
- Churchill n. (5/15)
- moondust n. (5/15)
- mouse type n. (5/14)
- hung up adj. (5/14)
- sideways market n. (5/14)
- Bristol dust n. (5/14)
- booth turnaround n. (5/14)
- YAWN n. (5/13)
- doodlesocking n. (5/13)
- job and knock n. (5/13)
- radwaste n. (5/12)
- meat without feet n. (5/12)
- night-out money n. (5/12)
- podbusting n. (5/12)
- short-and-distort n. (5/12)
- yoging n. (5/12)
- nightstand Buddhist n. (5/9)
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