vomit comet
n.— «A San Juan travel agent indelicately calls it the “vomit comet”—an allusion, I imagine, to the great number of babes in arms or inexperienced travelers aboard the planes. It was therefore with some misgiving that I booked a seat on the midnight economy flight from New York to San Juan.» —“All Aboard for the ‘Cattle Car’ ” by Victor Perera New York Times Jan. 24, 1971. (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...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...