ambulance chasing
n.— «In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons. But the only theory he and Dr. Lee could come up with was ugly. A few weeks later it turned out that the triplet effect wasn’t true.» —“At Fermilab, the Race Is on for the ’God Particle'” by Dennis Overbye New York Times July 24, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Why does the term vegetarian cause so much confusion? Some people assume it means avoiding red meat but still eating chicken. And is there a term for a vegetarian who also eats fish and poultry? Plus, screwball comedies from the 1930s mix slapstick...
Michelle in Thorne Bay, Alaska, uses nervous Nellie for herself on snowy roads and wonders who Nellie was. The expression, meaning a timid or overly cautious person, shows up in the early 1920s and was popularized in political talk about Frank B...