crowning
n.— «He was very concerned to discover evidence of a brutal practice called crowning” in countryside between Holt and Broughton Gifford, near his home.…setts. They use terrier dogs wearing tracking devices to explore the underground tunnels of a badger sett. When the dog stops moving it usually means it has come nose to nose with a badger. The men dig down through the earth to capture it. They then fill in the hole with earth to cover their tracks.» —“Ecologist condemns ‘barbaric practice’” Wiltshire Times (Trowbridge, Wiltshire, United Kingdom) Dec. 3, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
After our conversation about various names for a television remote control, a listener emailed to say that early remote controls produced an audible tone that activated the TV channel changer and volume, and whenever his dogs Lupe and Bubba stood up...