watermelon
n.— «The keynote speaker, William H. Holms, presented a talk entitled, “Wimps, Weirdos and Watermelons,” in which he stated environmentalists were just a bunch of unemployed welfare-leeching Communists. He suggested that the timber industry should join forces with the farming and mining (oil) industries and mount a “hate campaign” against the environmental community, which he portrayed as “green on the outside and red on the inside.”» —“Letters to the Editor: “Hate Campaign”” by Harry Vaughn San Francisco Chronicle Mar. 25, 1991. (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...
How do social media algorithms shape the way we communicate? A new book argues that the competition for clicks is changing the way we speak and write, from the so-called “YouTube accent” to the surprising evolution of the word preppy. Also: A...