perp
n.— «He ordered a Boston bull terrier and when the dog come accompanied by it’s [sic] pedygree it was found the pesky perp was born in some town in Wisconsin. Whaddyamean Boston bull?» —“Clunette Clippings” Lincoln Daily News (Neb.) Mar. 29, 1915. (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...