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
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...
We use the term Milky Way for that glowing arc across the sky. But how people picture it varies from culture to culture. In Sweden, that starry band goes by a name that means “Winter Street,” and in Hawaii, a term for the Milky Way...