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
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Aubrey in Waco, Texas, says her mother used to warn the kids against contracting honkus of the bonkus, a fanciful name for a contagious disease. This colloquial term probably comes from the words bonk and konk, meaning “to hit” or...