dry hole
n.— «The Sunday night raid was what soldiers here call a “dry hole.” They received an intelligence tip, and it led to nothing.» —“Soldiers in Sunni Town Run Into Wall of Silence” by Josh White in Samarra, Iraq Washington Post Dec. 23, 2004. (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...