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
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...