vertical corpse
n.— «Most of the time a photojournalist, myself included, will take the expected shots. If it is a basketball game, it is safe to assume an armpit will appear on the back of the newspaper the following publication day. If it is a meeting, a “vertical corpse” (as they are called by photographers who dislike such dull images) will appear in the paper.» —“Photo column: A pleasant surprise” by Ryan Rendleman in Southern Illinois University Carbondale Daily Egyptian Mar. 5, 2008. (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...