dark house
n.— «Some of my earliest outdoor memories where the times I spent seated next to my maternal grandmother in a tiny ice shanty situated on Black Lake near Onaway, Michigan. The interior of the structure was just large enough to allow a pair of anglers to sit side-by-side and tall enough for a short person to stand up. In other sections of the Great Lakes these shanties are often referred to as “dark houses,” but they are all the same basic structure.» —“Fine decoy folk art highlights upcoming show” by Mike Zielinski News Herald (Southgate, Michigan) Sept. 2, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Rose in Lebanon, Virginia recalls a phrase passed down from her great-grandmother: The night before the first day of school, parents would come into the children’s bedroom and say in a singsong voice: School butter, school butter. This...
Diana from Tucson, Arizona, reports that when she was young, her Irish grandmother would chase her and her misbehaving siblings around the house yelling, “You omadhauns!” Also spelled amadán, this word of Celtic origin means...