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
Twice a day the River Thames recedes, revealing a muddy shoreline. Hobbyists known as mudlarks stroll the surface searching for objects that have found their way into the river over the centuries, everything from ancient Roman jewelry to modern...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...