throw signs
v. phr.— «All you guys here sitting talking about that hard stuff, the most you know how to do is throw signs.…You ain’t no hard-core criminals.» —“Street Voices: The Next Generation Series” Los Angeles Times June 26, 1988. (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...
Aaron in Los Angeles, California, notes while using public transit in Britain he and other passengers were instructed to alight from the front, meaning “exit the car from the front.” Alight comes from an Old English word alihtan, literally, to...