rhyparographer
n. a painter of unpleasant or sordid subjects
Language
Lettershift
This must mean something — move each letter in COBRA three places forward in the alphabet and you get FREUD:
A Sharp Wit
A musical joke, by J.F. Rowbotham, 1908:
… wrote a musical wit to a friend of his, and in these terms conveyed an invitation to dinner. What is the explanation of it? “One, sharp. Beef and cabbage.” His friend, who was not behindhand at a joke, though by no means so witty as his host, replied:–
… which reads off by the same hieroglyphic: “Not a bad feed. Naturally (natural E) I will be in time.”
Rowbotham also offers this rather mean-spirited message for a vain lady:
Dot Bomb
Hijinks is the only common English word with three dotted letters in a row. Among proper nouns, Beijing and Fiji are better known than Australia’s Lake Mijijie, but all three lose out to the Katujjijiit Development Corporation, a property development concern in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
Can we beat this? A reader tells me that pääjääjiiri is Finnish for “main ice mitre,” and possessiveness contains 18 consecutive dots in Morse code.
But the all-time winner must remain H.L. Mencken, who in 1938 ridiculed the New Deal by filling six columns of the Baltimore Evening Sun with 1 million dots — to represent “the Federal Government’s immense corps of job-holders.”
Misc
- EPISCOPAL is an anagram of PEPSI COLA.
- Only a perfect square has an odd number of divisors.
- “Makes no sense makes no sense” makes no sense.
- The grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol include working oil rigs.
- “Time is the only critic without ambition.” — John Steinbeck
In a Word
ascob
n. a cocker spaniel of “any solid color other than black”
Market Play
Barnum used to bring consternation into the hearts of his grocers by complaining that their pepper was half peas. When they protested, he would quietly ask, ‘How do you spell pepper?’ and the catch stood revealed.
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
In a Word
lasslorn
adj. forsaken by a lass
In a Word
kalopsia
n. the delusion that things are more beautiful than they are
Inspiration
A French versifier, equally deficient in poetic fire and worldly pelf, and whose nether garments were rather out of order, had commenced a series of epics on scriptural subjects. One was on the subject of Lot, and commenced,
L’amour a vaincu Loth.
On reading this aloud, his friend feigning to understand it thus,
L’amour a vingt culottes,
with a significant glance at his breeches, asked him why he did not borrow a pair. Can your critical French readers explain any difference in the sound of the two lines?
— The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822