bang
v.— «After an hour-long rain delay, the umpires called the game because the field was a mess.…”Early in the game I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re going to get banged pretty soon,’ but once we got into the fifth, sixth inning and they didn’t bang it I said, ‘Well, we’re going to play right through.’”» —“Chiefs Slosh Past Ottawa At Big Mac Syracuse Wins Its Home Opener In A Game Called After Seven Innings Because Of Rain” by Matt Michael Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) Apr. 13, 1994. (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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...