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mayonnaise (paid)

  • Dave Wilton

Dave Wilton

11 Sep 2026 • 2 min read
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Photo of a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise

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Marble frieze of a centaur grabbing a man by the throat; the man is grabbing the centaur’s hair

centaur / reverse centaur

11 September 2026 [A version of this entry originally appeared on 6 August as a Words in the News segment.] The word centaur, of course, refers to the mythological, hybrid creature that has the head, torso, and arms of a human and the body and legs of a horse. The
11 Sep 2026 6 min read
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Dialect Quiz

10 Sep 2026 1 min read
Pen-and-ink grotesque of two men, mouths agape, driving through a desert toward an abstract city, bats flitting about them

gonzo

9 September 2026 The word gonzo is inextricably linked to writer Hunter S. Thompson, famed for his style dubbed gonzo journalism. In Thompson’s usage, gonzo is a highly subjective, first-person style, characterized by distorted and exaggerated facts. Thompson first used the word in print on 11 November 1971
09 Sep 2026 7 min read
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