A Dancer Who Walks for a Living - 19 November 2012

<p>You dream of writing the great American novel, but to make ends meet, you spend your days writing boring corporate reports. There's a difference between writing for love and writing for a living—or is there? And does a heyday have anything to do with hay? Did getting dressed to kill originally refer to soldiers? Plus, toad-in-the-hole, deadwoods, due diligence, kibosh, clues, and an election-year word puzzle.<br /><br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />Being a writer and making a living as a writer are often two different things. Maybe you're writing poetry at night but by day you're writing technical manuals or web copy. Journalist Michael Erard, whose day job is writing for think tank, describes such a writer as "a dancer who walks for a living." How do you make the transition between the two? How do you inspire yourself all over again to write what you love?<br /><br />What do you call it when you're about to jump into a conversation but someone beats you to it? Mary, a caller and self-described introvert from Indianapolis, calls it getting seagulled, inspired by an episode of The Simpsons in which nerdy Lisa works up the courage to participate in a conversation, but is interrupted at the last second by a screeching seagull.<br /><br />In her new book, The Introvert's Way, author Sophia Dembling refers to this experience as getting steamrolled. A different kind of interruption is getting porlocked, a reference to the visitor from Porlock who interrupted Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reverie while he was writing the poem Kubla Khan and made him lose his train of thought. Have a better term for these unfortunate experiences?<br /><br />Leah from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, wants to know the origin of the name of the Delmarva Peninsula. It's a portmanteau name, made of parts of the names of the three states represented there: Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture at Salisbury University is a great source for more information. <br /><br />Do you keep copypa