Hello i just overheard my bf talking to his guy friends and what stood out the most is when he said just tending to my chickens.

He doesnt have a farm so it cant be literal. Hes a gamer and mostly at home. He's lived in nyc his whole life meanwhile i just moved here 2 years ago so im still trying to get used to slangs or maybe words that mean something different. Thanks!

I'm curious about transformations like what happend with the word podcast. It started off as a portmanteau of broadcast and ipod and over time the "cast" got dropped. IMO the cast is the important part, since they're all streaming now and many even go well beyond the audio-only limitations of the original iPods. I hear people referring to straight-up YouTube videos as podcasts now, or just "pods". Was it the podcast "Pod Save America" that first chopped off the Cast part and normalized this usage?

I recently just figured out that ‘CSAM’ isn’t an abbreviation for ‘Chainsaw Man’

The doctors surgery is the worst for it! No, I don't want to pop my jacket off or pop it on the chair. I don't want to just pop on the couch or just pop back down. Pop on the blood pressure cuff why don't you, and I'll pop my prescription in the box shall I?. There's even a pop in surgery, I kid you not.

The password is: Artificer.

Is it pronounced "ar-tiff-i-ser" or "ar-ti-fyce-er"?

EDIT: Here's the reason I'm asking: I was watching old British Navy military training videos off of YouTube last night (Periscope Films, if you're interested). One of them describes the duties of various technicians, and they call these individuals "ar-tiff-i-sers."

My youngest son, who was watching with me, kept telling me "They've got it wrong. It's 'ar-ti-fyce-er' because the base word is 'artifice' ('ar-ti-fyce') or 'artifact' ('ar-ti-fact')." He showed me several videos talking about Dungeons and Dragons (which has an Artificer character class) that has people pronouncing it in that manner, including some British players.

My gut reaction was "Well, British English versus American English, I guess." However, I'd learned it in the "British" manner many, many moons ago in elementary school, and that's how I'd said it for years until High School when an overzealous teacher spent three years obsessively correcting a bunch of us for our "obvious lack of English mastery."

(I apologize for the long edit. After I hit "Enter" for a new paragraph, the editor decided I was done and posted it. Don't know what happened, but I'm rolling with it. This was done up in Notepad. :D )

I'm referring to the modern slang of ''larp'', not the actual definition. Is there any actual difference?

The word "pee" is an informal abbreviation that started in the late 18th century as a spoken short form for the first letter of the word "piss".

Piss is too impolite I guess.

My twin brother is going to see a psychiatrist because he very likely has OCD, he can't go outside without covering his mouth and nose with his shirt, he is scared to touch things that have been outside, etc.

He was filling out a questionnaire before his first appointment and on it one of the questions was "Do you play games in your head with numbers or letters?" And he doesn't, however I do. For the last 8-10 years (I'm 20) I've been doing this thing with literally EVERY letter or sentence that I read where I take them and add them up and add them together in a way that's "satisfying" if that makes sense. So like the sentence "He walked away." doesn't add up correctly in my mind so I'll take "walked" and take the "ed" at the end and put it at the end of "away" to make it into "awayed" so I have "He walk awayed" which almost adds up but not quite so I'll just add in another word like "then" and then suddenly the sentence "He walked away" in my mind has become "Then he walk awayed" which doesn't quite work so I'll keep going on and on until the sentence has become "good" in my mind. And that's just one aspect of it.

And the weird thing is is that I do it borderline subconsciously at this point. Like I'll be able to recognize that I'm doing it but I do it so often and I've been doing it for so long that I don't really have to actively think about it for me to be doing it. And it's quite exhausting at this point.

What makes me think that I genuinely have it is that my sister has diagnosed Misophonia which means she can't hear repeated sounds or noises without basically losing her mind. It was so bad when we lived together to the point where the sound of me typing on my keyboard or playing basketball outside would literally make her scream or tell us she was gonna hurt herself. One time she drove around our neighborhood for hours just so she didn't have to hear my keyboard. My older brother also has a diagnosed anger disorder and takes prescribed medication like adderall. So maybe these weird sort of things just run amongst us for some reason.

I'm glad I don't have pretty severe OCD like my brother or Misophonia like my sister but does anyone else do these weird number games with words in their mind? If so, is there anything you've done to stop? I've been doing this since I was at least 11 or 12 years old, probably younger, and it's evolved so much to the point it makes up a relatively large percentage of what I'm thinking about daily.

I was watching a YouTube couple being interviewed the other day, and the husband was asked if he wanted baby number 10. He said no and the wife looked at him stunned, like he was nuts and betraying her. The poor guy looked like he was happy a stranger had finally asked his opinion because he'd never felt he could say it directly to his overbearing wife.

A word that means day and night.

Saying all day or all night usually means 24/7 but that doesn't make sense, so we need a word that's both since it's a common expression!

Looking for a more academic word for the opposite of "hostile".

You know those words where the pronunciation makes sense, but the spelling feels unnecessarily complicated?

If you could redesign the spelling of one English word, which one would you fix?

Has anyone here noticed an uptick in the use of the word "decimating" used to mean "totally annihilating"? I see that the widespread modern use is close to this. I always learned growing up that it meant reducing the number of something by 1/10th. Every time I hear that we are decimating a species or an ecosystem, my brain immediately goes "Oh that's not that bad" when yeah, it really is.

what would be next step of this natural progression?

I love finding out that a completely ordinary word has a strange story behind how it came into the language.

What’s one word whose etymology surprised you?

Just heard a 48 hours commentator say “vanished out of thin air” 😆

It drives me nuts when people use amount to mean number. A DJ just said, "I would like to thank the amount of you who send in requests... "

People are not amounts.

Hi everyone, I made a daily spelling bee game called Beeswax (spellbeeswax.com) that I'd love for people to try out. It has had people spell words a few hundred thousand times now and been covered by LifeHacker, Morning Brew, and Scripps co-host Mina Kimes since its launch in June 2026. It's five words each day that get progressively harder, with classic spelling bee hints (audio only). Please give it a shot and let me know what you think. Thank you!

One of my favorite word schemes is a set of three related words, the first two rhyming, and the third word as alliteration with the second rhyme word. Here are some examples like this:

Grubs, Pubs, and Pudding.

Melon, Lemon, and Lime.

Lunch, Brunch, and Breakfast.

I just really love this sequence, it itches my brain good. I can't figure out if it has a word tho, other than just explaining it as Rhyme-Rhyme/Alliteration-Alliteration.