snag
n.— «The burn had consumed four acres when Holmes and a few other team members approached a tree known in forestry parlance as a “snag”—dead or dying timber that poses a threat of falling.» —“Firefighter Crushed to Death as Part of Tree Topples” by Eric Bailey in Sacramento, Calif. Los Angeles Times Oct. 5, 2004. (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...