joy rider
n.— «“On the second day, we were quite bad, very seasick,” said Laura Browning, 51, of Manchester, England, who sailed to New York with her husband, Steve, aboard the Queen Victoria.…“The crew distributed some tablets to those of us who felt sick. “We call them ‘joy riders’ in the U.K.,” Mrs. LeRiche said of the tablets. “They make you feel really good, especially with some Bacardi and Coke.”» —“Three Seafaring Queens Spend a Day in New York” by Fernanda Santos New York Times Jan. 14, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A young caller from the Hudson Valley of New York wonders about his grandmother’s use of stemwinder to praise a speech she thought was excellent. In the early 1800s, people used pocket watches that had to be wound with a tiny key. Once someone...
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...