Word of the Day

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, The Word I'm Thinking Of: A Devilish Dictionary of Difficult Words, which will be out later this fall from Zabriskie Street Press.

zarf (noun)

A holder for a hot coffee cup

"The coffee, as thick as chocalate and sweetened with honey, reminded her of home and the odor of boiling sugarcane.... With a flourish, she removed her thumb, and balanced the zarf on the tip of her index finger...."
--Barbara Chase-Riboud, Valide

Those little cardboard thingamabobs they put around your coffee cup at Starbucks are technically called "zarfs", although they'll try to tell you they're called cup sleeves (boring!). Whenever I forget my ceramic coffee mug at work, I have to use a paper cup, and they're too damn hot to hold -- life is tough. There are no zarfs there, so I make my own, putting one (hot) paper cup inside another (cool) one. Resourceful! It does make it a bit harder to sip, though. Like I said, life is tough.

(Wasn't there some cartoon alien named Zarf?)