lily pad
n.— «We went too deep in Guam with our closures. It’s the last piece of land in the west that we own. It’s United States owned. It’s going to be a lily pad for moving out.» —“House Committee On Appropriations: Subcommittee On Military Construction Holds A Hearing On FY 2003 Pacific Command Appropriations” by Dennis Blair Federal Document Clearing House Mar. 7, 2002. (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...