condolence payment
n.— «The amount of cash the U.S. military has paid to families of Iraqi civilians killed or maimed in operations involving American troops skyrocketed from just under $5 million in 2004 to almost $20 million last year, according to Pentagon financial data. The dramatic spike came in what’s known as condolence payments, which are distributed to Iraqi families whose members were caught in U.S. crossfire or killed or injured during U.S. ground and air assaults.» —“Families reunite as first of 2,500 inmates set free” by Solomon Moore, Suhail Ahmad in Baghdad San Francisco Chronicle June 8, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...
Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...