rice bowl
n.— «But some also comes from an institutional, bureaucratic drive to have more airplanes and a bigger share of Navy and Defense Department budgets. “The air-systems people saw that whole program as a gigantic rice bowl they could put their hands into,” a critic in the Pentagon said.» —“How Hornet Was Stripped Of Values It Began With” by Richard Halloran in Washington, D.C. New York Times Nov. 23, 1982. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...