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
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Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...