ghosted
adj.— «The marshals got to the ground floor, where the fire had been hottest and raged the longest. Every step of the stairwell and each railing and inch of banister was alligatored. Parts of the wall were “ghosted,” fire parlance for places where fire burns so strong that it erases its own soot, leaving raw, bleached patches of brick.» —“Working Backward and Seeking Reasons in the Ashes” by Cara Buckley New York Times Mar. 10, 2007. (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...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...