lily pad
n.— «Terrorist Osama bin Laden had a different agenda, he said. “He uses Afghanistan as a lily pad, a place to be, a place to go out and kill other people around the world.”» —“Rebels close in on last Taliban stronghold” by Hilary Mackenzie in Washington, D.C. Ottawa Citizen (Can.) Dec. 1, 2001. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...