foghorn
n.— «“Olive, don’t use foghorns,” Convergence Contact Centre trainer Nilanjan Roy tells Olive Watson alias Mithu Malik. “Foghorns,” for the uninitiated, are the “hmms” and “ahaas” that punctuate tele-conversations.» —“Concise Desi Dix” by Nikhat Kazmi Times of India (New Delhi) July 13, 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...
In Japanese, the word san (さん) means “three” and kyuu (きゅう) means “nine.” Said together, the words sound like English “thank you,” so back in the 1990s, when pagers were all the rage among Japanese teens, typing 999 was a quick way to punningly...