pepto
n.— «But you have to distinguish greenies—the peptos as they were called—from steroids. Greenies only allowed you to play up to your ability. If you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, or you had a hangover, it would allow you to play up to your ability, or at least some players thought that. It did not create a different human being. It did not change your physical makeup. It did not allow you to play beyond your ability, your normal ability as steroids do and as Human Growth Hormone does.» —“Interview with Ball Four Author, Jim Bouton” All on the Field Sept. 18, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
An old Irish curse goes: May the devil make a ladder of your backbones while picking apples in the garden of hell. If you’d rather offer someone a friendlier wish, try May angels bless your sleep with the smell of apple pies. This is part of a...
In an interview about her magisterial history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon), Isabel Wilkerson noted that her own writing process poses the same challenge any writer has: “One word followed by another word...