al-tali
n.— «Kidnap is now so common new words have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang. A kidnap victim is called al-tali or the sheep.» —“Inventing Sovereignty” by Tom Engelhardt AlterNet June 23, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...