cowdust time
n.— «By “cowdust time,” the evocative Indian term for dusk, we are still 30 miles from our village. After asking the way a dozen times (Indians tend to be relaxed about the subtle difference between “left”and “right”), eventually we find it but, in the darkness, it looks like no Indian village we have ever seen.» —“My village hut’s a mansion” by Stephen McClarence in India Telegraph (U.K.) May 6, 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...
Old. Elderly. Senior. Why are we so uncomfortable when we talk about reaching a certain point in life? An 82-year-old seeks a more positive term to describe how she feels about her age. And: a linguist helps solve a famous kidnapping case, using the...