rocking chair job
n.— «One way to finance a rise in wages, he said, would be to get rid of secretaries to secretaries, rocking chair jobs and jobs that overlapped.» —“Urge Pay Increase Before Aldermen” New York Times Oct. 2, 1919. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Sigrin writes from Albany, New York, that she misheard our earlier conversation about the expression shaving yak hair meaning “performing a monotonous, tedious task.” At first she thought we said shaving gnat hair, which she figures is...
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...