pull a heart muscle
v. phr.— «Mr Richardson claimed the strict anti-doping policies employed at the Games had prevented most drug cheats from setting foot in the village. “A lot of people who went home early with injuries I believe actually pulled a heart muscle and left because they knew what would happen to them.”» —“Bulgarians syringe litterers, says Richo” by Luke McIlveen, Natasha Bita Weekend Australian Sept. 30, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...