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
A California listener shares a couple of pranks from her time in the U.S. Marines, where unsuspecting recruits would be ordered to complete impossible tasks. She remembers that newbies would be sent to retrieve a bucket of frequency grease or a...
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...