rowback
n.— «A week ago, Kinnock began a famous rowback that I read about in the London newspapers last Monday morning. He still wanted to get rid of the Trident submarine missile systems contracted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he said in a television interview, “but the fact is that it does not have to be something for nothing. The fact is now that it can be something for something.”» —“Kinnock thinks again about nukes” by Wilbur G. Landrey St. Petersburg Times (Florida) June 12, 1988. (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...
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of...