grits line
n.— «Alexandria still has its Jefferson Davis Highway and Springfield its Robert E. Lee High School, but if last week’s election showed anything, it’s that Northern Virginia is not only different than the rest of the state, it is a different state. And it’s no longer in the South. That line now starts at the Rappahannock River, where things change—the accents, the attitudes, the pace and a comfort with the way things are. It’s what some historians call the new “grits line.” To them, it’s no surprise that the state’s northernmost welcome center on Interstate 95 is in Fredericksburg.» —“So Close, Yet So Far Apart” by Brigid Schulte, Chris L. Jenkins Washington Post Nov. 16, 2006. (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...
Ophelia in Johnson City, Tennessee, wonders about the exclamation her great-grandmother often used when something surprised her: Cat bristle! That may be her own version of a minced oath, although it fits with the idea of how a cat’s tail might look...