rookie wall
n.— «We’re showing good maturity out of the young guys.…They got over the wall. The rookie wall hits around week nine or 10 and you see some guys start to fade a little bit mentally. They’ve persevered through it and now that they’re on the other side of it, they’re improving.» —“Tampa Bay’s Defensive Line Accepts Monte Kiffin’s Challenge” by Mike Cobb The Ledger (Lakeland, Florida) Nov. 25, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
In 1916, a small-town newspaper in Pennsylvania printed a fanciful item about a local gathering with a guest list that included, among others, Miss Ella Vader, Mr. Ray Zor, and other punny names. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
In an interview about her magisterial history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon), Isabel Wilkerson noted that her own writing process poses the same challenge any writer has: “One word followed by another word...