Muffled giggles from the other side of the seminar table. I walk around, find that one of my freshmen is on a page early in The Catcher in the Rye. “What’s funny, guys?” More giggles, but no response. “Seriously — what’s up here?”

“Umm. We aren’t sure what ‘necking’ means.”

“Oh. It means making out. OK?”

I typically do take a little time near the start of the novel to run through the terms and phrases that they might not know. The allusion to David Copperfield on page 1 always needs explaining (no, not the magician). They get “corny” just fine, but not “giving her the time.”  They can figure out what “the can” is from the context, but the phrase “for the birds” is apparently confusing. (As one student said, “When I read that, I wondered if birds were going to be important later. You know, like, symbolic or something. So I kept looking for them.” Not unlike Holden and the Central Park ducks.)

I also sometimes have to explain phrases I use routinely. One day just after Family Weekend, a writers’ workshop I’d planned was devolving into an unexpected kind of entropy–no laptop here, dead laptop there, a new cast on a hand, misplaced book. I sighed, “We’re all going to hell in a hand-basket.”

“What’s ‘going to help in a basket’?”

It goes the other direction, too.  I was reading an essay this fall that contained the term “hammy down.” My little Ah ha! moment came when I read it out loud: “hand-me-down.” As in clothing. A colleague told me that on her EDT last spring, she heard a student using the phrase “an old wise tale,” and that she recently overheard “two peas in a pot” and “play it by year.” Another faculty friend reported stumbling upon the delightful “It’s a doggie dog world” in a paper.

There’s a third branch to all this, and it’s rooted in my own anxiety (not misplaced, experience tells me) about innocently using a word or a phrase  that’s now NC-17 or even X-rated in the world out there. For those moments, I trust urbandictionary.com.

You wouldn’t believe the things I find in there. Gives new meaning to the phrase “life-long learner.”