haltura
n.— «He is treating the Foreign Ministry portfolio as a haltura, (a side job), which has left the Foreign Ministry and all its accumulated expertise in a shambles.» —“Wanted: A foreign minister” by Yosef Goell Jerusalem Post (Israel) Sept. 28, 1998. (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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...