atta-boy
n.— «“I like doing this sort of thing. I like helping people, and I’ve often said that this is probably one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever had because we aren’t paid with money,” said Debra Sauerbier, Red Cross Volunteer. “We always refer to it as our atta-boys.”» —“A Holiday Without Pay” by Shari Small KSBY-TV (San Luis Obispo, California) Sept. 5, 2005. (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...
Kim from Council Bluffs, Iowa, notes that kırmızı, the Turkish word for “red,” sounds a lot like the English word crimson. Are they related? Yes! Both derive from a word for the insect whose scientific name is Kermes vermilio. The English words...