flying truck
n.— «He now finds it a little bizarre to be piloting an old MI-17 Russian helicopter, a legacy of the Soviet invaders here, in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan.…The United States is training American pilots to fly the helicopters of the former Soviet Union—Colonel Brandon calls them “flying trucks.”» —“Facing Language Gaps and ’Flying Trucks,’ U.S. Trains Afghan Pilots” by Elisabeth Bumiller in Kabul, Afghanistan New York Times Feb. 27, 2009. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
An anadrome is a word that forms a whole new word when you spell it backwards. For example, the word “stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts.” Some people’s first names are anadromes. There’s the girl named Noel...
A flashlight doesn’t flash. It provides a steady beam of light. So why is it called a flashlight? The earliest versions lit up only briefly before the batteries gave out and required a recharge, so they were literally “flash lights...