emacity
n. the urge to spend money
oniomania
n. an uncontrollable desire to buy things
Language
Truthful Numbers
- FOUR contains four letters.
- TEN is spelled with ten raised dots in Braille.
- TWELVE is worth 12 points in Scrabble.
- FIFTEEN is spelled with 15 dots and dashes in International Morse Code.
TWENTY-NINE contains 29 straight lines — if you don’t count the hyphen.
R.I.P.
Writing in the New York Mercury in 1863, Robert Henry Newell noted the curious pine-board epitaph of a Union fifer at Manassas:
The lower portion “had to be inscribed figuratively, in order to get it all upon the narrow monument.” It means:
“In all its praise of that quiet sleep in which there are no anticipations to be disappointed, no gluttony to make sick, and no Confederacies to guard against,–the verse will be plain to all.”
In a Word
maritorious
adj. fond of one’s husband
This List Contains …
- fifteen Es
- seven Fs
- four Gs
- six Hs
- eight Is
- four Ns
- five Os
- six Rs
- eighteen Ss
- eight Ts
- four Us
- three Vs
- two Ws
- three Xs
A Pangrammatic Highway
A 0.8-mile stretch of northbound Interstate 287 in New Jersey contains these signs:
WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS
NO TRUCKS IN LEFT LANE
LAFAYETTE AVE.
EXIT 20 MPH
BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD SURFACE
INTERSTATE NEW JERSEY 287
To date this is the shortest reported stretch of U.S. highway whose permanent, official signs contain all 26 letters of the alphabet. Do you know a shorter one?
“The Farmer’s Life”
The farmer leads no E Z life;
The C D sows will rot;
And when at E V rests from strife
His bones all A K lot.
In D D has to struggle hard
To E K living out:
If I C frosts do not retard
His crops there’ll B A drought.
The hired L P has to pay
Are awful A Z, too;
They C K rest when he’s away,
Nor N E work will do.
Both N Z can not make to meet,
And then for A D takes
Some boarders who so R T eat
& E no money makes.
Of little U C finds this life;
Sick in old A G lies.
The debts he O Z leaves his wife.
And then in P C dies.
— Anonymous, The Indiana School Journal, August 1886
Reversible Cursive
Written in script, the word chump reads largely the same upside down.
In a Word
nosocomial
adj. (of an infection) acquired in a hospital
iatrogenic
adj. (of a medical disorder) caused by a doctor
Immortalized
In 1914, Collier’s assigned writer Julian Street to write a feature about Denver. Street duly arrived in town, but he didn’t venture far from the red-light district on Myers Avenue, and he spent most of his time there interviewing a Madam Leo, who gave him a story “hot enough to burn the paper on which it is written.”
To get even for the bad press, the town council ordered a new name for the prostitutes’ lane: They called it Julian Street.