unwetting
n.— «He cited the process called “unwetting,” describing it is the way water seems to be repelled or expelled from the surfaces of certain materials. When grapes were sprayed with a fungicide mist, he said, the liquid did not cover the grape, but formed a single droplet at the grape’s base. “Our research, which initially was strictly fundamental,” he said, made it possible to create sprays that covered 10 times as much of the surface of the grape.» —“LCD and Wine Researcher Pierre-Gilles de Gennes” by Martin Weil Washington Post May 22, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Authors often go through several working titles before settling on one. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Bookshop|Amazon) was originally Trimalchio in West Egg, Trimalchio being an ostentatious nouveau riche character in an ancient Roman work...
If you alternate alcoholic beverages with glasses of water over the course of an evening, you’re said to be zebra striping. This bit of slang was inspired by how the animal’s alternating black-and-white markings are like the contrast between the...