Granny Smith
n.— «When funeral director Roger Barker missed his appointment at a crematorium to collect a client’s remains, he dipped into an urn of “spare ashes” kept in the funeral parlour for just such emergencies. But the practice—known in the trade as doing a Granny Smith—did not go undetected, Oxford crown court heard yesterday.» —“Urn racket revealed” by Mark Honigsbaum Guardian (U.K.) Mar. 5, 2005. (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...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...