take a haircut
v. phr.— «The intent of such sessions is to identify what creditors will settle for. “But there was no goal seeking,…other than that everyone wanted 100 cents on the dollar. I think that nobody wanted to accept their fate, which was that everybody had to take a haircut.”» —“Living A Corporate Nightmare” by N.R. Kleinfield in Valley Stream, Long Island New York Times June 30, 1982. (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...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...