tap up
v. phr.— «Cole was fined £100,000 for being led—”manipulated” in the word of the independent commission or “tapped up” in soccer parlance—by his agent to the meeting while he still had 2½ years remaining on a five-year contract.» —“Lawyers smell blood as star is punished” by Rob Hughes in London, England International Herald Tribune June 2, 2005. (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...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...