grow teeth
v. phr.— «A mysterious Taiwanese-born floor trader, Hwalin Lee, singlehandedly cost another CBOE clearing firm more than $50 million in a huge short position in S&P 100 puts that exploded into the money even before Oct. 19. In traders’ jargon, the puts “grew teeth.”» —“The Crash—One Year Later: In the Pits —How One Options Dealer Blew $9 Million” by Jonathan R. Laing Barron’s Oct. 17, 1988. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Language from inside a monastery. A Benedictine monk shares terms from his world: For example, corporate prayer refers to praying as a group, not urging shares to return dividends. And did you know there’s a term of art for those annoying add...
Joan from Buffalo, New York, wants to know how to spell a particular word that means to spiff up, clean up, straighten, or fix. The word is zhuzh, which has had dozens of different spellings over the years because it’s primarily transmitted...