October 2010
15 posts
2 tags
words wholly unrelated
pig & piggy bank
wut!?! are you seated? are all of the power tools in your house—including your 14-inch robin gas, 6 horsepower, walk-behind concrete saw—safely powered off and unplugged? are your hands suitably restrained by soviet-era russian tumbcuffs? have your wits been comfortably dulled by a few quick hits of sydenham’s laudanum (opium + saffron + cinnamon + cloves + sherry...
2 tags
3 tags
fighting your weight in wild cats
in this 85th edition of f-words, we visit one of my most prized possessions: a dictionary of slang, jargon & cant: embracing english, american, and anglo-indian slang, pidgin english, tinker’s jargon and other irregular phraseology by barrère and leland (1890).
that some of these terms are no longer used anymore is utterly shocking. how often do words fail us when we take our hugo...
2 tags
"she can read novels and milk cows"
It was generally believed in bygone days that in this country a husband might lawfully sell his wife to another man, provided he conducted the transaction in some public place and delivered her to the purchaser with a halter about her neck.
as first lines go, this is perhaps one of the oddest. the only problem is that it’s not actually the first line, nor is it from a novel—it’s...
3 tags
2 tags
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
nobel season
oh man, remember when vonnegut received the nobel prize in 1997? of course, when i say nobel prize i mean the ig nobel prize and when i say vonnegut i mean bernard vonnegut, kurt’s physicist brother.
bernard was awarded his ig nobel for a paper that he wrote in 1975 entitled chicken plucking as measure of tornado wind speed.
One way of estimating the wind in a tornado vortex is to...
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
