burnout
n.— «Fortunately it didn’t quite come to that, thanks to quick thinking from fire crews, who initiated burnouts. It may look out of hand, but these fires were set by firefighters intentionally. The idea…if you set a fire yourself, you’re in control of it, and if the real fire comes close there won’t be anything left on the ground to fuel the blaze.» —“Hot Day Ahead for Firefighters in S. Utah” by Sammy Linebaugh KSL-TV (Salt Lake City, Utah) June 30, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...