levanton
n.— «During the last 10 years, hundreds of people from Tijuana to Matamoros have been forcibly carted off by heavily armed men sometimes sporting police insignias and uniforms. They are the victims of a style of violence known in border lingo as the “levantón,” which could be literally translated as the “lift” or “pickup.” Occasionally the “levantados” turn up murdered baring signs of torture but frequently they are transformed into memories of agony for distraught relatives.» —“Mexico’s Forgotten Disappeared: The Victims of the Border Narco Bloodbath” by Mark Getty in Ciudad Juárez Frontera NorteSur (New Mexico) Jan.-Feb., 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
An anadrome is a word that forms a whole new word when you spell it backwards. For example, the word “stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts.” Some people’s first names are anadromes. There’s the girl named Noel...
A flashlight doesn’t flash. It provides a steady beam of light. So why is it called a flashlight? The earliest versions lit up only briefly before the batteries gave out and required a recharge, so they were literally “flash lights...