moonball
n.— «From the extreme to the subtle, there was Torben Ulrich, the bearded Danish eccentric who found himself playing Bill Hoepner in the 1953 Pacific Coast Tournament at the Berkeley Tennis Club. Hoepner was intensely annoying, known to repeatedly tie his shoes, wipe off his glasses or throw up towering “moonball” lobs for no good reason. Trailing 11-9, 4-1 and bored out of his mind, Ulrich finally walked to the net, told Hoepner it “wasn’t any fun,” and quit.» —“Time for on-court decorum to return” by Bruce Jenkins San Francisco Chronicle June 28, 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...
In Japanese, the word san (さん) means “three” and kyuu (きゅう) means “nine.” Said together, the words sound like English “thank you,” so back in the 1990s, when pagers were all the rage among Japanese teens, typing 999 was a quick way to punningly...