whale
n.— «In horseplaying parlance, Maury Wolff is a whale, one of the thousand or so professional bettors who collectively wager as much as $1.5 billion a year on thoroughbred races in the United States. He will not attend the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on Saturday. In fact, he and the other whales rarely set foot in a racetrack.» —“Horse Racing’s Biggest Bettors Are Reaping Richest Rewards” by Joe Drape New York Times Apr. 26, 2004. (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...