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Reader question: Please explain “spitball some ideas” in this sentence: We can Skype or exchange emails to spitball some ideas. My comments: Here, the speaker wants his/her group to exchange ideas and proposals via Skype or email. Yes, but “spitball”? Yeah, literally, that’s, like, spitting in the air and see where the spitballs, tiny bits of saliva, fall. Seriously, that’s about it, too. Spitballing originally refer to the schoolboy trick of chewing bits of paper into a tiny ball-shaped mass and tossing it around for idle fun or using it as a toy weapon to hit the teacher or a fellow student with. As a weapon, it’s sometimes done by inserting a spitball into a tube and then shooting it out by blowing hard into the other end. I and most members of my generation used to play that game when we were school age, back in the 1970s, that is. Come to think of it, back in the day, a long while ago to be sure, children used to have silly games like that, silly, simple, mindless and lots of fun. Today’s children, in contrast, have nothing but technology based plastic or metal gadgets to play with. These manufactured toys are fine and large, not to mention usually expensive, but, if you ask me, are nothing to compare with some of the hand-made toys of yesteryear. Anyways, spitball is literally a ball made with one’s spit. This term is believed to be American in origin (1840-50, Dictionary.com). Later in the early 1900s, it gained a new usage in baseball, where players sometimes spit on the ball before pitching it, making the slippery ball somewhat less predictable in flight. | 
