run the traps
v. phr.— «I ran the traps around the lexical trade, even asked my brother, who assured me it wasn’t Robert Louis Stevenson.» —“Right Stuff In The Bully Pulpit” by William Safire New York Times Mag. Feb. 27, 1983. (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...