dental casualty
n.— «“In Desert Storm there were 35,000 dental casualties,” military parlance for soldiers who could not perform their duties because of problems with their teeth.» —“N.J. units prepare for active duty in Iraq” by Justo Bautista The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey) Dec. 13, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif once observed that “The duty of the writer…is to remind us that we will die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is part of a complete episode.
Related
Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...