monster
n.— «The $30 worth of hits turned into a $3,000-a-month monster. Now the monster is Irene’s top priority. She’s been on crack three years. Three times in rehab. Three times a failure. “This is not an addiction that you can click off and on like a light switch,” she said. “You gotta set a goal and you work up towards that goal.”» —“Feeding the monster: Life of a cocaine addict” by Glenn E. Rice Kansas City Star (Kan., Mo.) Apr. 11, 1993. (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...