perp
n.— «The owners of good dogs pay and the question now remains how to secure the revenue from the perps that are always under foot, always at the heels of horses, always digging up plants in the park and forever howling and scrapping at night.» —“Who Wants To Be Dog Catcher For City” Oxnard Courier (California) Sept. 2, 1910. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
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...