keep a slot warm
v. phr.— «An airline is flying an empty passenger jet between Heathrow and Cardiff on a daily basis—just so that it can hold on to its lucrative slots at the London airport.…The flights reveal the lengths to which airlines will go to hang on to runway slots. A slot is the right to use a runway for a take-off or a landing at a given time of the day. The practice is known in the airline industry as “keeping slots warm.”» —“Heathrow’s ‘ghost’ flights” in London, England The Australian (Sydney, Australia) Mar. 12, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Twice a day the River Thames recedes, revealing a muddy shoreline. Hobbyists known as mudlarks stroll the surface searching for objects that have found their way into the river over the centuries, everything from ancient Roman jewelry to modern...
Joan from Buffalo, New York, wants to know how to spell a particular word that means to spiff up, clean up, straighten, or fix. The word is zhuzh, which has had dozens of different spellings over the years because it’s primarily transmitted...