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 convoluted and...
What do you call the nasty black mixture of snow and ice that builds up in your car’s wheel wells in wintry weather? Is there a word for this frigid gunk? Various names have been floating around, including hunkers, snard, snowlactites, knobacles...

