monster
n.— «My mother, who i do not smoke around, has been here and she doesnt even know why Im coughing. She found i smoke years ago but she doesnt know the symptoms enough to see the monster in her son. And I dont have that heart to tell her why. She leaves tomorrow. No hospital imprisonment, no parental shame, just me and my monster.» —“6 days after surgery, struggling” by tempslave@hotmail.com Usenet: alt.support.stop-smoking June 29, 1998. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Janet in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that a day after she had surgery on her hand, the wound burst open, and a doctor noted that her wound dehisced. She’s used to hearing dehisce used in botany to mean the splitting of a plant structure to...