big smoke
n.— «Johnny Kay, who is a big smoke in the Indian camp, when approached on the subject, misapprehended the question.» —“Indians Divided On Copper Coins” Nevada State Journal (Reno) July 27, 1909. (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...
Heidi from Reno, Nevada, shares a bar game in which players take turns trying to recite by memory the increasingly long concatenation of phrases one fat hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bear, four running hare, five fickle female, six simple...
