beater
n.— «“We really wanted to be in Clinton Hill,” said his wife, a writer, describing their house hunt. “Unfortunately, we were two years too late to really find a beater.”» —“Émigrés” by Kate Julian New Yorker (New York City) Jan. 2, 2006. (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...
When there’s no evening meal planned at home, what do you call that scramble to cobble together your own dinner? Some people apply acronyms like YOYO — “you’re on your own” — or CORN, for “Clean Out your Refrigerator...