back door draft
n.— «[Arnold] Garcia:&hellip’”The use of the increaseing dependence on the reserve and guard components amounts to, as one of the editorial writers said in a meeting yesterday, a back door draft.”…[Carol] Lin: “That’s interesting. A back door draft. In a sense even though it’s a volunteer army, but these guys didn’t sign up with the idea of spending their Christmas in the desert, I [sic] sure, certainly under these battle conditions.”» —“New Poll Shows Half Of Americans Disapprove Of Bush’s Handling Of Iraq” by Carol Lin CNN Sunday Nov. 9, 2003. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A California listener shares a couple of pranks from her time in the U.S. Marines, where unsuspecting recruits would be ordered to complete impossible tasks. She remembers that newbies would be sent to retrieve a bucket of frequency grease or a...
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...