crock
n.— «Hospital staff privately refer to them as “crocks”—people who repeatedly show up in emergency rooms demanding expensive, exhaustive tests to unearth the elusive cause of their numerous symptoms. Reassurance that their tests don’t show anything amiss has the opposite effect, convincing these patients that physicians haven’t looked hard enough—or don’t believe them.» —“Cognitive therapy answers the unexplained” by Sandra G. Boodman Quad-City Times (Davenport, Iowa) Aug. 31, 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...
Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...