dead-man brake
n.— «Cars have been built with brake pedals.…We have built-in hand-braking controls and so-called “dead-man” brake controls.» —“Suggestion for Relocation Of Accelerator Shows Many Plans Tried” by Herbert Chase New York Times Aug. 3, 1941. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...
Chase from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in Sacramento, California, where kids played Rochambeau instead of rock, paper, scissors. Why the difference in names? Nobody knows. Folklorists call this a choosing game, and while the hand-game itself...