poodle-balling
n.— «“Don’t you think it knows the other plants are laughing at it?” Turnbull said recently as she drove by a bizarre little tennis ball that was once a shrub. Trimming a row of boxwoods or yew into a hedge is fine, but she believes poodle-balling a forsythia or mock orange, which wants to be a fountain of flowers, takes bad taste to the level of immorality.» —“She’s Struggling To End ‘Senseless Torture’ Of Trees” by Constance Casey Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Lousiana) July 19, 1998. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Sara in Madison, Wisconsin, was reading an old edition of The Joy of Cooking and came across a recipe that described a cake’s ingredients as earrings for an elephant. She couldn’t discern whether the authors meant that was a good thing...
Asthenosphere, a geologist’s term for the molten layer beneath the earth’s crust, sparks a journey that stretches all the way from ancient Greece to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Plus: What the heck is a dogberg? It’s when...