trace off
v.— «She got a warning that she’d be evicted if she didn’t pay her rent within a certain time. She had paid her rent, however, and checks with her bank indicated that the cheque had been encashed fairly promptly too. She therefore wrote her landlord a letter “tracing him off” as we say here…(cussing him out).» —“A Happy Ending!” by Mad Bull The Mad Bull’s Blog Sept. 5, 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...
June in Miami, Florida, says every time she hears the name of this show, she’s reminded of a story that involves the tradition of fruit-filled Easter buns in her native Jamaica. She’d put hers on a windowsill at work, but at some point when she left...