rosh katan n. an attitude of avoiding responsibility, of extreme self-interest, or of strict adherence to rules to the point of obstruction or absurdity; a person with such an attitude; in British English, a jobsworth. Editorial Note: The Hebrew is ראש קטן ‘small head.’ The term seems to have arisen in the Israeli military. (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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...