To drink the Kool-Aid is to become a firm believer in something or a passionate follower of a philosophy or movement. The expression is usually pejorative, implying that the Kool-Aid drinker is blindly following something that doesn’t merit such devotion. It also may suggest the drinker has ... Read more
Football fields
As a unit for measuring area, football field is roughly equal to an acre or, to use another colloquial measurement term, a city block. As a measurement of length, it's roughly 100 yards. The term can be useful for giving a vague sense of size, but it's also imprecise and perhaps condescending to ... Read more
Mancession
Mancession is a neologism---a fusion of man and recession---used in reference to the recent U.S. recession's disproportionately harsh effects on men. The word is somewhat troubling. Akin to other man-based neologisms like man cave, mantrum, and man crush, it makes light of millions of people's ... Read more
Perfect storm
A perfect storm is a rare combination of events or circumstances creating an unusually bad situation. The idiom is derived from the 1997 Sebastian Junger nonfiction book, The Perfect Storm, about a fishing-boat crew encountering a confluence of several storms at sea. The expression fills a gap in ... Read more
Proactive
Proactive, an adjective meaning acting in advance to deal with expected circumstances, emerged in the 1980s and '90s as a business buzzword. Like many buzzwords, it irritates some people. The main complaint against proactive---an early-20th-century coinage---is that it's often used where active ... Read more
Speak to
The phrasal verb speak to is widely used idiomatically to convey various senses, including show, demonstrate, express, relate to, address, or speak about. For example, one might say that this post speaks to the meaning of speak to, or that the existence of this idiom speaks to a gap in the ... Read more
Decidedly
The adverb decidedly is often a highfalutin word for certainly, clearly, or very. And like those adverbs, decidedly can be useful in specific circumstances---especially where it means emphatically or resolutely---but more often it could be removed with no loss of meaning. Example For example, ... Read more
Disconnect
Disconnect is traditionally a verb meaning to sever or interrupt a connection, but in recent years a noun sense has gained prominence. The noun refers to (1) an inability to mentally reconcile two or more things, (2) an inability for two or more parties to agree or to understand each ... Read more
On steroids
In news writing and politics, the phrase on steroids has become the go-to modifier for any new thing that is bigger and more advanced than a previous version. The phrase works as a metaphor, but it's been so extensively overused during the last few years that it's lost all rhetorical strength. At ... Read more
State of the art
The advertising buzz phrase state of the art began as a noun phrase referring to the current highest level of development in a field, but today it's also often used as a phrasal adjective meaning at the highest level of development. In the latter use, state of the art is usually hyphenated. When ... Read more
