toe popper
n.— «The VC use anything and everything to build their devil’s devices. There were toe poppers—normally a single bullet no bigger than a pencil, set on top of a nail; step on it, and the bullet pushed down into the nail and fired through your foot.» —by David H. Hackworth Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts May 7, 2002. (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...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...