Paul from Duluth, Minnesota, heard Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, quoting Boston Mayor Tom Menino, call a health-care law an alcatraz around his neck. The idiom is albatross around your neck, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the...
gassing n.— «Some have been so desperate to do violence against their jailers that they’ve patiently stored the elastic from their underwear to use in constructing makeshift crossbows; others save their feces and urine to fling at the...