brickor mortis
n.— «Falling house prices have caused property website Rightmove to coin a new phrase. “Brickor mortis” is the paralysing condition caused by sellers refusing to lower prices as they don’t accept their home’s value has dropped. Buyers won’t buy as they think homes will be cheaper in the future—or because they can’t get a loan.» —“Revealed: Middle Britain will be hardest hit by falling house prices” by Becky Barrow Mail Online (United Kingdom) July 18, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
In the thriller Down Cemetery Road starring Emma Thompson, a character uses the Briticism safe as houses, meaning “quite safe,” an expression thought to derive either from the sturdiness of a house or the sense of real estate as a secure investment...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...