chimère
n.— «“I have a mother, a wife, children, why would I vote? I could be shot by a chimere,” said Kapito, 40, an unemployed taxi driver who gave only his first name, using a pejorative term to refer to armed pro-Aristide militants.» —“‘We have a new enemy’ in Haiti” by Reed Lindsay in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti Dallas Morning News (Texas) June 5, 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...
Aubrey in Waco, Texas, says her mother used to warn the kids against contracting honkus of the bonkus, a fanciful name for a contagious disease. This colloquial term probably comes from the words bonk and konk, meaning “to hit” or...