blue canary
n.— «“This is a different kind of training, because usually an officer rushes right in. Here, we get them to approach slowly and size up the situation,” said Chinn, a former narcotics officer who first got anti-terrorism training to deal with threats from Colombian drug lords. “We don’t want firefighters to use police officers like blue canaries. If a firefighter counts down until he finds the last police officer, that’s not a good thing.”…“Identify. Isolate. Notify. Stay uphill, upwind, upstream and at least 300 feet away.…Don’t be a blue canary. Don’t be a coptometer.”» —“Terror Incident Rewrites Police Manuals” by Monica Rhor Miami Herald (Florida) Nov. 11, 2001. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A documentary film called My Beautiful Stutter follows youngsters at a summer camp specifically for stutterers. It’s a place for finding acceptance, support, and confidence for navigating the larger world. And:, “The High Priestess of...
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of...