bleeding deacon
n.— «“If anything is going to destroy A.A.,” says Dr. John Norris, a nonalcoholic physician, friend of Bill Wilson’s and for many years chairman of A.A.‘s board of trustees, “it will be what I call the ‘tradition lawyers.’ They find it easier to live with black and white than they do with gray. These ‘bleeding deacons’—these fundamentalists—are afraid of and fight any change.”» —“The Changing World of Alcoholics Anonymous” New York Times Feb. 21, 1988. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
Floordrobe is the new word for an old habit: piling your clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added an entry for it, defining floordrobe as “an untidy heap of discarded clothing left on the floor...