bummer
n.— «Sometimes, in spite of all our encouragement, a ewe will refuse to accept her lamb.…Some people call the rejects pet lambs, but other shepherds—including us—refer to them as bummers. Sure, they’re cute when they follow you everywhere, but the toddlers are also real nuisances to any busy farmer!» —“Living Through Lambing” by Elora McKenzie Mother Earth News Jan.-Feb., 1982. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Need a book to lift you out of this world? Try Orbital (Bookshop|Amazon). In it, Booker-winning novelist Samantha Harvey imagines the moment-to-moment experience of living on a space station, a mixture of the mundane and the majestic, 250 miles...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...