phone freeze
n.— «The Canadian press has highlighted an unreturned phone call from Prime Minister Paul Martin to President Bush, dubbing it the “phone freeze.” Martin telephoned last week to explain why he had spurned Bush’s appeal to join in a missile defense system for North America, but the president did not return the call, according to reports in the Canadian press that have not been disputed by officials.» —“U.S. relations with neighbor to the north increasingly icy” by Doug Struck in Washington, D.C. Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, Pa.) Mar. 6, 2005. (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...