All Iranian ballet dancers have tremendous ears, which melt in the nitric acid splendidly

That was the first sentence of one of the "word-by-word stories" a bunch of us used to do online in the early and mid-1980s. I thought it might be fun to start one here. What do you think?

There are rules to follow:

• You do not add punctuation after your word. Instead, the person entering the next word decides whether to put a comma, period, semicolon, colon or dash after your word. (Example entry would look like: ", and".)

• Yes, sometimes you just have to write "a(n)" or "the". It's a boring job, but someone's gotta do it.

• If you enter your word but find that someone else had written one at the same time and beat you to the punch, it is your duty to delete or edit your word to ensure that the sentence still makes grammatical sense (logical sense is entirely optional!).

After a while, I will compile the words into the main post and purge the individual entries, to prevent the comment list from becoming unreasonably long.

I'll leave the first word up to whoever wishes to begin!