sleeper
n.— «For many of Ms. Scavo’s regulars—the eBay resellers, the pickers (who sell their finds to other dealers or designers and decorators) and the obsessive collectors—the sales are indeed fun, but also cutthroat. As they do throughout the region, dealers who come to her events have been known to hire sleepers, who arrive as early as two nights before to reserve the first spots in line.» —“No Such Thing as Junk” by Susan Dominus New York Times Mar. 5, 2007. (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...