flake
n.— «I took a large flake of hay and laid it on some rails which I had fixed for that purpose, and creeped under it, to shelter myself, in some small measure, from the rain.» —by Stephen Burroughs Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs (Boston) , 1835. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Writer Jhumpa Lahiri grew up speaking Bengali and later English, then became passionately devoted to a third language, Italian. Her book In Other Words: A Memoir (Bookshop|Amazon) is a love letter to Italian and a vivid account of the challenges and...
Among London cabbies, a musher is somebody who owns their own cab, a starving musher is someone still paying for their cab, and musher’s lotion is rain. The book Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages (Bookshop|Amazon), writer Ben...