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
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
When there’s no evening meal planned at home, what do you call that scramble to cobble together your own dinner? Some people apply acronyms like YOYO — “you’re on your own” — or CORN, for “Clean Out your Refrigerator...