Now more than ever, there’s a firehose of slang terms flowing from TikTok vids, Twitch streams, Twitter memes, and the other outlets of the extremely online. What’s a menty b? Why are TikTokers adding -ussy to everything? What does it mean to be told to touch grass? You might be sorry you asked, but we’re going to explain it all. We’ll also provide insights into …
Love is a many splendored thing. That must be why there are so many ways to talk about it. Thanks to love songs, poetry, music, movies, and art, the language of love seems to be constantly expanding, and what better time to brush up on the myriad ways to express your love and affection than on Valentine’s Day? You might be working on a few …
Why is everyone suddenly tweeting about OK boomer? What is that Baby Yoda meme all up in our feeds about? And who are Becky and Karen, anyways? Oh, we’ve got this. We love keeping up with the latest terms in slang and getting to the bottom of the funniest, strangest, and, yes, thorniest trends in pop culture and social media. We love it so much, …
On Independence Day (July 4th), we ooh and ahh at the fireworks bursting in air, but did you know that the different types of fireworks effects have their own names? What’s a peony firework? The peony is one of the most common kinds of aerial pyrotechnic effects. It is named for a variety of plants with large, showy flowers. This firework display has a flower-like explosion …
In the upcoming presidential election, Americans will get to choose between the two major candidates: Donald Trump of the Republican Party and Joe Biden of the Democratic Party. Or, as his name will more than likely appear on the ballot, Joseph R. Biden. “Joe” is such a common nickname of “Joseph” that we often forget that celebrities such as Joe Jonas and Joe Frazier aren’t …
It’s hot again, up in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s that time of year when the sun shines its most unforgiving beams, baking the ground and, indeed, us. It’s the portion of summer known as the hottest time of the year. Or, more delightfully, the dog days. Contrary to common conjecture, the dog days do not take their peculiar name from weather that “isn’t fit for …
by Nick Norlen, Senior Editor Like everyone else, we’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the program that uses AI to generate text modeled on a vast database of existing writings. But instead of prompting it to produce a natural-sounding passage, we wanted to find out: can it compile unnatural-sounding phrases—ones that don’t exist in any known piece of published writing? The base prompt was simple: “Compose …
5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … Happy New Year! As we all know, the first day of the new calendar year is when we pop the champagne, blow up fireworks, and make a resolution that we will inevitably never actually accomplish. But why do we do all of these things? You might be surprised to learn that there are reasons behind …
Legally, to trademark something means to make it so that only one company can make money off of something with that name. You might not realize it, but many of the seemingly generic words we use all of the time are or were registered trademarks. This is often a problem for companies who want to avoid their lucrative trademarks being killed by “genericide,” meaning they …
From NASCAR tracks to Washington, D.C., here are the words that were blowing up the Dictionary.com trending charts October 19–26, 2018. Funner Semi-retired NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. dropped the word funner on Twitter last weekend, drawing out the language snobs to correct him on his usage. There’s just one problem: Funner is, in fact, a word! Informal though it may be, the word that spiked …
