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
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...
Gay in Tucson, Arizona, remembers her grandmother inviting guests in with take off your cape and fascinator and have a seat. Originally, a fascinator was a kind of scarf that held one’s hair in place and added an air of mystery, and thus...