dog
n.— «Race track “dogs” (or the equivalent thereof) could have been a factor in the International victory of France’s Match II.…They’re in the category of the carpenter’s “Horse”…A few feet of two-by-four with four legs attached.…The removal of two legs, from one end, turns a horse into a dog. The wooden dogs, often seen in guarding a street excavation and holding a red light at night, once were stock equipment at all race tracks.…Most have been replaced by the inverted yellow traffic cones. Dogs or cones are placed several feet out from the inside rail at times when a track is wet, so that this part of the racing strip will be protected during morning workout hours.» —“About Horses And People…” by Walter Haight Washington Post, Times Herald Nov. 15, 1962. (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...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...