rubber room
n.— «Reluctant to mess with the Speaker’s monument without strong backup, the G.S.A. boss, Gerald Carmen, asked for a report from his Office of Oversight, which is headed by William Clinkscales, who gained fame during the Carter years by blowing the whistle on Federal waste. For that, the Carterites had placed him in a “rubber room”—bureaucratese for an office without work to do—until Republicans came in and made him the agency’s official whistleblower.» —“Ozymondias O’Neill” by William Safire New York Times Apr. 11, 1983. (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...