alligator
n.— «He picks up a piece of rubber and flings it aside. In an instant, he is back to the safety of the grassy side strip. Again, he gauges the traffic and leaps onto the road to grab an “alligator.”» —“Driven to aid motorists in distress” by Shaun Sutner Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, Mass.) Sept. 15, 1997. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Following our conversation about the use of the term devil strip to denote the strip of land between sidewalk and street, listeners chimed in with other terms from their areas. In Portland, Maine, some people call it a hell strip. In Washington...
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...