crank rental
n.— «Call it a crank rental. Then there’s the “rock ride,” when a crank addict reports his own car stolen after lending it out in exchange for a rock of methamphetamine.There’s one particular upscale car, a Lexus, on Tuesday morning’s list that the officers immediately greet with suspicion as a rock rental in their daily briefing.» —“The State Bumper Crop of Auto Thieves Thrives” by Geoffrey Mohan in Fresno Los Angeles Times (California) May 6, 2001. (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...
Aaron in Los Angeles, California, notes while using public transit in Britain he and other passengers were instructed to alight from the front, meaning “exit the car from the front.” Alight comes from an Old English word alihtan, literally, to...