What do these sentences have in common?
They’re all precisely the same length.
Language
Off With Their Heads!
Show this bold Prussian that praises slaughter, slaughter brings rout. Teach this slaughter-lover his fall nears.
Grim, no? But remove the first letter of each word and the mood changes:
How his old Russian hat raises laughter — laughter rings out! Each, his laughter over, is all ears.
“Language,” wrote Flaubert, “is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
In a Word
decemnovenarianize
v. to act like a person of the 19th century
In a Word
spaneria
n. a scarcity of men
spanogyny
n. a scarcity of women
All Aboard
The smallest integer whose name includes all five vowels is ONE THOUSAND FIVE.
Balance
The word LOVE displays a perfect symmetry in the English alphabet: its letters are evenly distributed around the center.
In a Word
karoshi
n. death from overwork
In a Word
mouton enragé
n. a normally peaceful person who has become suddenly enraged or violent
Literally, “angry sheep.”
Oops
Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defines garret as “a room on the highest floor of the house.”
It defines cockloft as “the room over the garret.”
In a Word
remontado
n. one who has left civilization and returned to the wilderness
Sarah Bishop was a young lady of considerable beauty, a competent share of mental endowments and education; she possessed a handsome fortune, but was of a tender and delicate constitution, enjoyed but a precarious state of health, and could scarcely be comfortable without constant recourse to medicine and careful attendance. She was often heard to say that she had no dread of any animal on earth but man. Disgusted with her fellow-creatures, she withdrew from all human society, and at the age of about twenty-seven, in the bloom of life, resorted to the mountains which divide Salem from North Salem: where she has spent her days to the present time, in a cave, or rather cleft of the rock, withdrawn from the society of every living being.
— G.H. Wilson, The Eccentric Mirror, 1813