taper
n.— «I wanted to come back here and start my “taper,” because I particularly like how my mother “tapers” me.…After beating yourself up in the water, you need to get rid of all of the lactic acid and stuff that has built up in your system for the last six months or year.» —“Swimmers make big splash in Texas” by Colin O’Connor Royal Gazette (Bermuda) July 17, 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...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...