cotton curtain
n.— «Cotton Curtain. Five thousand miles apart, two men speaking different languages were last week discussing “free voting.” Said one: “I will arrest any man who is against us…on election day….” Said the other: “Let a handful vote this year and two handfuls will vote next year. You will be justified in going to any extreme on election day…to keep them from voting.” The first man was Colonel Moczar, chief of Security Police of Communist-run Lodz in Poland. He was trying to keep followers of the Polish Peasant Party’s Stanislaw Mikolajczyk from voting (see FOREIGN NEWS). The second was Theodore C. (“The Man”) Bilbo, inciting fellow Mississippians to “take care of” any Negroes who might want to vote in his state’s primaries.» —“Cotton Curtain” Time July 8, 1946. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
An anadrome is a word that forms a whole new word when you spell it backwards. For example, the word “stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts.” Some people’s first names are anadromes. There’s the girl named Noel...
Ahmed, a native speaker of Arabic who also speaks French, wonders how he should pronounce words from those languages when speaking English. For example, should he model the pronunciation for the name of the writer Kahlil Ghibran the country of Qatar...