gotcha call
n.— «Puerile, cringe-inducing, patronising and crude. These are just a few ways to describe Matt Tilley’s popular gotcha calls on Fox FM.…In the past few years, prank telephone calls to unsuspecting Melburnians have become a key element of show.» —“The good side of gotcha” by Wendy Hargreaves The Age (Melbourne, Australia) Nov. 7, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
In 1803, a shy British pharmacist wrote a pamphlet that made him a reluctant celebrity. The reason? He proposed a revolutionary new system for classifying clouds — with Latin names we still use today, like cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Also: when...