tin medal
n.— «You can let your hair grow long, shove your sombrero on to the back of your head, strike your breast close to where you’ve pinned that tin medal you made yourself.» —“Medicine Man Gets Patriotic” Washington Post Oct. 6, 1907. (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...
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...