hole in the doughnut
n.— «Like prospectors in what they hope will be a modern-day California Gold Rush, Hollywood’s studios and TV networks are dabbling in online downloads, mobile phone programming and other new on-demand distribution models. But the people who create the precious commodity these outfits are mining fear they won’t get to dip their pans in whatever new revenue streams these added platforms create. “All the guilds refer to it as the hole in the doughnut,” said John Wells, executive producer of NBC’s “ER” and “The West Wing,” and a former Writers Guild president. “You hear a lot of talk about other things that are important [to the unions], but the one thing that will shut the whole town down is if we don’t resolve the hole in the doughnut—for all the creative guilds.”» —“The Chicago Tribune Phil Rosenthal Media column” by Phil Rosenthal TMCnet Feb. 3, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a word-pecker is “a person who trifles or plays with, or quibbles over, words.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Word-Peckers” I always love it when I’m looking through the dictionary and...
Responding to our conversation about the word chat, meaning “the gravelly residue of mines,” Isabella from Marquette, Michigan, reports that where she lives, in the state’s Upper Peninsula, such runoff is commonly called slag. She uses some made-up...