looming
n.— «The term for misjudging an oncoming train is “looming,” said Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell, and it can have deadly consequences. “You can’t accurately judge the distance of train,” she said. “They are always closer and faster than they appear.”» —“Police turn up the heat at crossings” by Jason Wells in South Glendale Burbank Leader (California) Feb. 21, 2007. (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...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...