take a haircut
v. phr.— «To account for the fact that the shares cannot be sold, FBR uses an accounting technique known as a “liquidity discount,” or, in the jargon of Wall Street, “taking a haircut.” Back to your house, the one with the value that increased to $300,000 from $200,000. If you decide to take out a home equity loan to pay your child’s college tuition, most lenders won’t let you borrow the full $100,000 increase in value. They’ll lend you only 80 percent of the value, which means taking a haircut of 20 percent.» —“Evaluating FBR’s Earnings: ‘Haircut’ or a Close Shave?” by Jerry Knight Washington Post Nov. 20, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Default as a noun and default as a verb are the same word, with a familiar English stress shift: nouns often take first-syllable stress, while verbs often take second-syllable stress, as with the different pronunciations of record. A New York City...
If you work in tech support, you might use snarky slang for problems caused by computer users themselves. There’s the acronym PEBCAK, for example, which stands for Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard. And: a lush poem about the sea inspired by...