lily white
n.— «Ever-tighter IRA internal security and the organisation’ use of “lily whites,” activists with little or no known history of involvement in violence who keep their distance from the Irish community in Britain, have been given as reasons for the recent successes of the IRA’s mainland campaign.» —“RUC is strongest thread in web spun to destroy the IRA” by Richard Ford, Stewart Tendler Times (London, England) Apr. 23, 1992. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...
What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus, a new book shows what’s lost when a language dies: when there...