Mental Floss

WORDS

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How often can you use the word "idiot" without falling into the idiocy of word repetition? Fortunately, there are many old, mostly forgotten terms ready for a revival.

Mark Peters








OliverChilds (knife), Ajwad Creative (speech bubble) // iStock via Getty Images Plus

Movies like 'Friday the 13th' and 'Halloween' have spawned sequels, remakes, imitations, and parodies—and they’ve also unleashed a whole of host of slasher slang.

Angela Tung






FX Network

The latest season of The Americans is wrapping up tonight, so it's time to make like deep-cover 1980s Soviet agents Philip and Elizabeth Jenkins, put on a wig, and take surveillance of these 10 spy and Cold War terms.

Angela Tung








Portrait of Robert Burns, painted by Alexander Nasmyth.

Polish up on this list of words and phrases from Robert Burns’s complete works. Highlighting the imagination of his Scots language, they are ripe for revival by Robbie revelers old and new.

Jared Spears


getty images/istock

Terms that first appeared in print in 1915 reveal something about life a hundred years ago. Although the war in Europe left its mark on the lexicon, there are also signs of the changing times in arts and culture.

Judith Herman
istock

The U.S. words of the year for 2014 included vape, culture, and #blacklivesmatter. But what about the rest of the world? Here are the word of the year winners from 13 other countries.

Arika Okrent
iStock/crisserbug

Cartoons, comics, and newspaper comic strips might seem like an unusual source of new words and phrases, but here are the stories behind 10 times when precisely that happened.

Paul Anthony Jones