alligator
n.— «In the coming months, I predict we’ll see an increase in people dumping real estate they can’t afford. They’ll be forced to sell because they’ll be eaten alive by a phenomenon known as negative cash flow. Investment properties that you have to feed money to every month are fondly known as alligators—if you can’t afford to feed the property every month, it eats you.» —“How to profit from a cooling real estate market” by Robert Kiyosaki Firstrung.com (United Kingdom) Oct. 12, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...