red
n.— «He extended his stop sign, the bus’s red lights started flashing, and its interior lights turned on. As a 10th-grade boy started to cross the road, a silver sports utility vehicle came screaming by. The young man jumped out of the way just in time.…This sort of thing happens all too often. Bus drivers refer to the phenomenon as “running their reds.”… The number of drivers who run reds is likely even worse than statistics suggest.…To make this task easier, officials at Pocono Mountain School District put forms in all its buses, so that drivers can track information on the scofflaws who run reds.» —“Bus drivers seeing red as speeders ignore warning lights” by Dan Berrett Pocono Record (Pennsylvania) Jan. 7, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
In the 15th century, the word respair meant “to have hope again.” Although this word fell out of use, it’s among dozens collected in a new book of soothing vocabulary for troubled times. Plus, baseball slang: If a batter...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski insists that the names of modern Olympic sports resulted from changing one letter in the original names for each activity. For example, he says, the pole vault must have originated from an earlier sport in which participants...