New York dress
n.— «Now let me tell you, chickens you sold fresh, they had to be almost still alive. When we first started selling chickens, they couldn’t have the skin broke on ’em, so they weren’t drawn. They just had their feathers off. The feet was still on ’em and the head ’cause that was what the housewife wanted to look at. She wanted to see how red the comb was and she would be able to tell the age of the chicken by seeing its feet. With the entrails still in the chicken like that, well, that’s called a New York dress.» —“When the count and countess made visits to Englewood” by Diana Harris Sun-Herald (Englewood, Florida) Oct. 28, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
An anadrome is a word that forms a whole new word when you spell it backwards. For example, the word “stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts.” Some people’s first names are anadromes. There’s the girl named Noel...
Sigrin writes from Albany, New York, that she misheard our earlier conversation about the expression shaving yak hair meaning “performing a monotonous, tedious task.” At first she thought we said shaving gnat hair, which she figures is...