wag
n.— «Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the figure of 5,000 insurgents “was never more than a wag and is now clearly ridiculous.”» —“Iraq Insurgency Larger Than Thought” by Jim Krane in Baghdad, Iraq My Way July 8, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...
Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...