blue canary
n.— «I’ve got to admit I was only a little surprised by the fact that the cops ran in the building without gear, common sense, etc. Have you ever seen cops approach the scene of a possible Haz-Mat incident? They’re not called “Blue Canaries” for nothing!» —“Re: COPS last saturday” by Harry Fell Usenet: misc.emerg-services Sept. 14, 1995. (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...