atmospheric
n.— «The hard part to deal with is that women and children shop in markets, so the person who planned and executed the bombing was clearly targeting women and children. I had been in that exact market only days earlier meeting vendors, talking to locals and collecting “atmospherics.”» —“Journal: ‘ThunderCat6’ gets to know Baghdad” by Tom Deierlein MSNBC July 28, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...