old head
n.— «Donnie excused himself. An emerald-green Oldsmobile driven by a man in his 20s pulled up to the corner. Donnie slinked into the back seat. “That’s his old head,” said one of the boys, using street slang for mentor. He was Donnie’s boss.…He introduced Mikey to the essence of being a man in their neighborhood—hustling while armed. “You can find an old head and he don’t care that much about you,” Mikey said. “He knew I had potential to stand on the block with a gun on my hip.”» —“Philly’s drug dealers: Younger all the time” by Simone Weichselbaum Philadelphia Daily News (Pennsylvania) Dec. 27, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What kind of book do people ask for most often in prison? Romance novels? No. The Bible? No. The most requested books by far are … dictionaries! A number of volunteer organizations gather and distribute used dictionaries to help inmates with...
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...