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
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...
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...