flipping
n.— «Those wetlands that remained were often tracts of infertile, troublesome land such as the West Coast pakihi swamps. Yet today even these are under pressure. Mechanical diggers are now used to smash the buried, impervious mineral pan (a method called flipping) creating land that can be used profitably to graze dairy cattle. This type of “improvement’—which destroys the drainage, vegetation and natural history—is still widely regarded as converting “wasteland” to productive use.» —“Bookshelf – In Print November 2008″ in Massey University Massey News (New Zealand) Dec. 1, 2008. (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...
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