chop
n.— «A gay supply officer aboard a nuclear submarine based in Norfolk heard that Clinton was lifting the military’s ban on homosexuals.…”I thought the change was imminent, that it was just going to happen really quickly. I thought I was safe,” said the lieutenant, nicknamed “Chop” after the pork-chop-shaped gold pin worn by supply officers.» —“Sailor Who Disclosed Homosexuality Now Finds Himself in Legal Limb” by Joyce Murdoch Washington Post Feb. 8, 1993. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
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...