splash mark
n.— «On the bridge side of the final concrete barrier between the shoes and Mahde’s body, there are four rough hollows where bullets struck. An American soldier points them out; he refers to them as splash marks.» —“US soldiers shoot first, no questions asked” by Gethin Chamberlain The Scotsman (Glasgow, Scotland) Sept. 17, 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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...