sandbox
n.— «The sergeant isn’t excited about war in the desert, but he isn’t sure that peace in the desert is a whole lot safer.…He had just three days to do laundry and convalesce before heading back into the sandbox.» —“Maps from St. Paul should help” by Jim Klobuchar Star-Tribune (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.) Sept. 22, 1990. (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 Louisiana listener shares a favorite passage from Laurie Lee’s memoir Cider with Rosie (Bookshop|Amazon), about his boyhood in post-World-War II England. An extract is here and contains the passage:“For the first time in my life I was out of the...