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
A California listener shares a couple of pranks from her time in the U.S. Marines, where unsuspecting recruits would be ordered to complete impossible tasks. She remembers that newbies would be sent to retrieve a bucket of frequency grease or a...
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...