Slang

With the Cubs and Sox in the playoffs, Chicago is trying to curb booze-fueled idiocy around the ballparks by asking nearby bar owners to suspend alcohol sales in the eighth and ninth innings of any possible series-clinching home game. Here are 10 takes on...

PRIESTS, PROSTITUTES, psychologists, cops, jazz musicians, poker players. Every trade has its jargon and "insider lingo." Soldier slang, however, has a peculiar appeal. That's understandable. Waging war is a risky, all-encompassing endeavor —...

As if the Obama administration didn't have enough trouble, First Lady Michelle Obama was criticized over the ticket sign-up system for the White House's Easter Egg Roll. In these scrambled times, let's examine some incredible but true egg facts: 1....

Don't be depressed by today's scary economic numbers. Sure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a frightening fraction of its former self. But math is proving useful in another way. Last month, Google offered a feature to its gmail customers to prevent e-...

Robin Cook, the first Robin Cook (not the guy who writes bestselling medical thrillers), was born in London in 1931 and died there 63 years later, suggesting an order otherwise absent in a chaotic and almost dottily brave life. Cook, married five times,...

Today the United States Postal Service adds Ruben Salazar to its honor role of American journalists by issuing a first-class Salazar postage stamp. But the former Times columnist had left his mark long before his death during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium...

The Canterbury Tales A New Unabridged Translation by Burton Raffel Geoffrey Chaucer The Modern Library: 624 pp. $35 Chaucer himself was a translator, people forget, his most important work along those lines being "The Romance of the Rose" and...

SO THERE'S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That's fine with those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled-codger shtick, which always sounded like Rooster Cogburn reading "The Turner Diaries" anyway. But if we're going to...

When the Rev. Bernard Smith started offering HIV screenings on church premises, the stigma of the disease followed him to his pulpit. "People would call you the AIDS preacher," the Largo pastor said. "But I wasn't interested, and listened to a higher...

I enjoy The Closer very much, but I have a problem understanding Kyra Sedgwick. Does she have an accent of some sort? Everyone else is intelligible. Or am I the problem? -- V.G., e-mail I wouldn't say you're the problem but you are the first to raise...

by Frank James On his "Change of Subject" blog, Eric Zorn suggests Illinoisans, and presumably Americans beyond the Land of Lincoln, stop snickering at good-government activists as "goo-goos, a put-down meant to suggest that they're idealistic, head-in-...

Ever stayed past the end of a movie, perhaps to catch the music credits, a blooper reel, or, in the case of the latest X-Men picture, a final scene that sets up the next film in the series? If so -- and we've all done this -- you've undoubtedly...