cat face
n.— «Atzet stopped again, to drill into the bulging bark of a cat-faced sugar pine. The cat face is a ring of bulging bark that has grown to heal a scar left by a fire. Because the healing bark is loaded with pitch, it tends to burn more intensely each time fire sweeps past, and the cat face grows.» —“Some Species Need Forest Fires to Survive Plants Sprouting in Charred Oregon Woodland” by Jeff Barnard Los Angeles Times May 15, 1988. (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...
Aaron in Los Angeles, California, notes while using public transit in Britain he and other passengers were instructed to alight from the front, meaning “exit the car from the front.” Alight comes from an Old English word alihtan, literally, to...