three-block war
n.— «Because counterinsurgencies are about winning hearts and minds, officers must be able to juggle what’s called the “three-block war,” fighting insurgents in one block, tending to wounded locals in another, and building a schoolhouse in the third.» —“Three years in Iraq force dramatic military changes” by John Yaukey in Washington, D.C. Green Bay Press-Gazette (Wisc.) Mar. 17, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...