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
When Marilyn from Boston, Massachusetts, used the expression Them’s the berries! with neighbors in her hometown of nearby Arlington, Massachusetts, she was surprised they were unfamiliar with it. The phrase means something like “That’s...
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...