big snip
n.— «The choral tradition has seen a preference for male alto voices.…With few volunteers for “the big snip” these days, they also make convenient stand-ins for the castrato voice—all the rage in vocal music of the baroque to early classical era—while lacking the penetration, power and high notes of these neutered men.» —“Classical CDs” Daily Yomiuri Dec. 8, 1998. (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...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...