Del Rio model
n.— «It’s all about speed. That’s the biggest difference in saving lives in this war.…We call it the Del Rio model, after a small town in West Texas about 150 miles from our stateside base in San Antonio. When you get hurt in Del Rio, there are lots of little community hospitals between Del Rio and San Antonio. But you shouldn’t stop there if you have a severe trauma. You want to go right to San Antonio. The medics know it, the pilots know it. Don’t make the intermediary stop. It’s a waste of time, and time is precious.» —“The Doctors of War” by Bob Drury Men’s Health Jan. 30, 2006. (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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...