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curd / crud / cruddy (paid)

  • Dave Wilton

Dave Wilton

21 Feb 2025 • 4 min read
Clip from a mid 19th-century book with the text of “Little Miss Muffet” and a drawing of a sitting girl looking at a spider

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Woodcut of medieval ruler giving a church official a bag of coin while the pope, above, dispenses rays of power
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quid pro quo (paid)

28 Nov 2025 2 min read
Photo of Sean Bean as Boromir from the Lord of the Rings with the words “One does not simply create a meme” overlaid

meme

Most of us are familiar with memes, those images with varying text that propagate, often virally, through the internet, but where does the word meme come from? It may be surprising to many, but the word meme was coined by biologist and famed promoter of atheism Richard Dawkins in 1976.
28 Nov 2025 3 min read
B&W photo of 5 young men measuring the length of a bridge by having one of them lie down while the others mark the distance

smoot

I usually don’t write up novelty words, but smoot has a neat ironic twist that is impossible to ignore. A smoot is a unit of linear measure equal to 1.7018 meters (5 feet, 7 inches). It is named after Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. (b. 1940). The smoot grew
26 Nov 2025 1 min read
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