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
Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...