punch mine
n.— «The museum is a history lesson of Wheatcroft’s rich coal-mining past.…Clark shows a picture of a stooped miner entering a punch mine.» —“Mining a father’s passion” by Garret Mathews in Wheatcroft Louisville Courier & Press (Kentucky) Jan. 28, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
If something pales in comparison to something else, the reference is to its intensity decreasing next to something even brighter. The pale in this case is unrelated to the one in beyond the pale, which has to do with territory marked by a literal...
In this bonus A Way with Words minicast, Martha and Grant look into the myriad stories behind the word cocktail. Does the drink name come from feathers? Horses? Something up a horse’s rump? It’s a weird wandering down etymology lane… This minicast...