bad bank
n.—Gloss: A government-run bank that intentionally takes on the bad debts and deals of another bank that is in financial jeopardy. «Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, condemns the term “bad bank.” He says the term does not exactly inspire support for the program. Maybe it should be called the “Damascus Road” bank, he says, or maybe the Fed should have a linguist look into something else more appealing. Mr. Bernanke replies that it’s officially called an “aggregator bank,” not a “bad bank.” Mr. Cleaver says that term is unlikely to catch on, and that perhaps a three-year-old should come up with something that rolls a bit more trippingly off the tongue.» —“Live-Blogging the Bernanke Hearing” by Catherine Rampell New York Times: Economix Feb. 10, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
Ribbon fall. Gallery forest. You won’t find terms like these in most dictionaries, but they and hundreds like them are discussed by famous writers in the book Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. The book is an intriguing collection...