hat-racking
v.— «Q: My neighbor has butchered his trees. He had hired someone who pruned off all the branches and leaves. Isn’t this harmful, not to mention ugly?…A: Yes, it’s a quite harmful to the tree’s long-term health. It’s commonly called “hat-racking.”» —“Hat-racking is harmful, illegal” by Adrian Hunsberger Miami Herald (Florida) Dec. 11, 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...
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of...
I am originally from Miami and have heard this word since the sixties. Usually hat-racking is done in preparation for a hurricane. Usually by the same people who crowd the hardware stores buying masking tape.