catchdog
n.— «Catchdog: A term guards use to describe officers who will beat up an inmate the brass wants subdued, without being given a direct order to do so and without filing paperwork. The term was previously used to describe inmates who, acting on orders from officers, beat up other inmates to keep them in line.» —“What the lingo means” by Adam C. Smith, Jo Becker St. Petersburg Times (Florida) Dec. 30, 1999. (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...
Chad in Hilliard, Florida, wonders about the expression old as Methuselah, meaning “extremely advanced in years.” The phrase references Methuselah, a figure in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition said to be 969 years old when he...