haltura
n.— «This last depicts a theater troupe’s desperate attempts to take a draft of a new play and, with only 20 minutes preparation, present it to the government censor for approval. As it happens, this drama about a revolution on a tropical island is perfectly awful, phoney art of the kind called haltura in Russian.» —“The Devil Comes to Moscow” by Mikhail Bulgakov Washington Post Nov. 17, 1991. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
The slang phrase someone ate and left no crumbs means the person did something really well. In a previous call, a listener who works in theater noted the use of ate to mean “did something well,” as in they really ate that haircut! This...