bullets, beans, and black oil
n.pl.— «As far as the officers of the fleet went, they had still to be fully involved with the day-to-day running of their departments, and with their ships. Their problems revolved around “bullets, beans, and black oil.”» —by Charles W. Koburger The Cyrano Fleet Mar. 7, 1989. (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...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...