cato
n.— «Cnce a year, on this bleak, 400-square-mile dry lake bed, they meet for the Indy 500 of rocketry, with waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration. This year, the subculture itself is on the defensive, unsure whether it will soar or come crashing down in a “cato”—lingo for a catastrophic failure.» —“A Cult of Backyard Rocketeers Keeps the Solid Fuel Burning” by Patricia Leigh Brown in Gerlach, Nevada New York Times Oct. 14, 2006. (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...
Heidi from Reno, Nevada, shares a bar game in which players take turns trying to recite by memory the increasingly long concatenation of phrases one fat hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bear, four running hare, five fickle female, six simple...