Catch My Fade - 22 December 2014

<p>This week on "A Way with Words," reaching out in the digital age: If you're sending out party invitations, what's a sure-fire way to get hold of everyone? Email? Snailmail? Facebook? Texting? Twitter? Or a plain old-fashioned phone call?  Different folks have different preferences, and accommodating all those communication styles can be a challenge. Also, when someone says Catch my fade, is that good news or bad? And: what to do if your cheese is blinky. Plus, pipe down, cease and desist, peach and bungalow, rush the growler, pagophilic, a famous insult from Hollywood, and a grandma's edgy phrase for washing up in the sink.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />There are two kinds of readers in the world: those who blow past a word they don't know, and those who drop everything, run to the dictionary, and dig and dig until they figure out what in the world something like pagophilic means. Yes, we fall into the latter camp. And pagophilia, if you're wondering, means "a love of ice." <br /><br />Cease and desist may seem redundant to the layperson—it's sort of like saying "stop and stop"—but for lawyers, it's a leak-proof way to say, stop and don’t ever do this again. <br /><br />Pipe down, meaning "shush," comes from the days when a ship's bosun (or bo's'n or bos'n, also known as a boatswain), would actually blow a whistle to tell the rest of the crew that the wind had shifted or a certain action needed to take place.<br /><br />We say rush the growler to mean "go fetch the booze" because, back in the 1880s, people got around the new liquor laws by sending kids scurrying down to the bar with an empty growler in hand to fill up. Variations of this include chase the duck and chase the can.<br /><br />An old book of proverbs gave us this one, which could be taken as a good thing or a warning: Wedlock is a padlock.<br /><br />Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski is back with a game called Definitely Cryptic, where the article "a" is combined with a word to form a new word. Try this one: "glass container; slightly open." <br /><