snag
n.— «A bolt of lighting had struck a 70-foot-tall snag—a standing dead tree—in the Tin Cup Creek drainage of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness early that morning, and was burning in what looked like knee-high brush.» —“For Firefighters, the Job Comes Down to Playing Percentages” by Jeff Barnard in Grants Pass, Ore. Los Angeles Times Dec. 9, 2001. (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...
Aaron in Los Angeles, California, notes while using public transit in Britain he and other passengers were instructed to alight from the front, meaning “exit the car from the front.” Alight comes from an Old English word alihtan, literally, to...