freshman stripe
n.— «Also at UCD: the infamous Freshman Stripe…Since the inner campus is closed to automotive traffic, many, many people ride bikes to class. When the rains come in late Fall, the freshman can always be spotted because they have a vertical stripe running up their backs, caused by the spray from their tires. Eventually they wise up and buy fenders.» —“Re: Spotting Freshmen?” by Scott Fischbein Usenet: alt.folklore.college Sept. 27, 1993. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
Some gems in this week’s mailbag: Following up on our conversation with a caller hoping to promote less-violent alternatives to the phrase kill two birds with one stone, a listener who grew up in India wrote in with one from her native language. In...