IAtionary: Pipe Bomb

Pipe Bomb [PAHYP bom] n.

1. Any dangerous-looking item, especially tubular ones that involve fire; Hey, what's that flaming thing behind you? Oh, that's just the pipe bomb.
2. A device used to intimidate others, usually with little to no actual potential to do harm

Language of Origin: Fisixian

My freshman year in Fisix Club, we built a contraption officially known as a "flame tube." The idea was this: we had a fairly long piece of PVC pipe with a line of tiny, closely-spaced holes drilled in it. We would hook one end up to a supply of natural gas, and the other to a speaker and frequency generator. By playIng the frequency, we could create a standing wave inside the pipe. When we lit the gas coming from the holes on fire, the height of the flame at any given point along the line would depend on the wave inside, making the height of the flame look like a wave. It was really cool to see the wall of fire with the varied heights- it really did look like a wave on top. Oh, and we could spray it with chemicals to get it to flare up in any color we wanted. Anyway, naturally we started calling it thePipe Bomb. Mr. Lyons told us it was bad PR and we should stick with Flame Tube, but it had already (sorry) caught on.