purple
adj.— «If you combine the colors of the uniforms of the four services, you come up with the color purple. Thus officers who do joint duty, working on projects that cross service lines, are called purple-suiters.» —“Congress gives final approval to Pentagon’s reorganization” by Charles Stafford St. Petersburg Times Sept. 18, 1986. (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...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...