tin medal
n.— «For some kind of tin medal for having made the least valuable contribution toward solving the strike situation in defense industries, we nominate those gentlemen who rose in the Senate and House and shrieked for “the electric chair” and “treason charges punishable by 25 years’ imprisonment” for strikers.» —“Plain Good Sense Will Pull Us Through” Clearfield Progress (Pa.) Apr. 8, 1941. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
One of the most powerful words you’ll ever hear — and one of the most poignant — isn’t in dictionaries yet. But it probably will be one day. The word is endling, and it means “the last surviving member of a species.” The...