sidewalk alumni
n.pl.— «He was talking in somewhat awed tones of the game he had seen the day before at the Polo Grounds—the one between the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears.…As one of the sidewalk alumni who was sitting just behind where we were sitting said, “That’s the best ‘gool’ line stand I ever saw.”» —“With Malice Toward None” by W.J. Lee Hartford Courant (Connecticut) Oct. 25, 1939. (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 librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...