ringman n. an auctioneer’s assistant. Editorial Note: OED has a sense of ringman ‘a sporting man; a bookmaker’ to which this could be related via an original shared meaning of ‘a person who occupies or attends an enclosed area.’ (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...