A Queens College teacher left a note on his classroom door:
PROFESSOR TOBIN WILL NOT MEET HIS CLASSES TODAY.
He later noticed that a student had erased the first letter in CLASSES.
So he erased the second letter as well.
Language
In a Word
egrote
v. to feign sickness in order to avoid work
Shorthand
“I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.”
“Typographical”
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
Back and Forth
Complementary palindromes:
DO, O GOD, NO EVIL DEED, LIVE ON, DO GOOD!
LIVE, O DEVIL, REVEL EVER, LIVE, DO EVIL!
In a Word
jehu
n. a reckless driver
Rejoinder
Does any English word contain all six vowels?
Unquestionably.
Turnabout
Is this a bad sum?
Not in a mirror:
Adapted by Martin Gardner from Henry Dudeney.
In a Word
imparlibidinous
adj. pertaining to an unequal state of desire between two people
Zoo Cliques
More nouns of assemblage:
- a business of ferrets
- a cartload of chimpanzees
- a coalition of cheetahs
- a congress of baboons
- a gang of elk
- a huddle of penguins
- a kaleidoscope of butterflies
- a labour of moles
- a prickle of porcupines
- a quarrel of sparrows
- a romp of otters
- a tiding of magpies
- a tower of giraffes
- a ubiquity of sparrows
- a whiteness of swans
- a zeal of zebras
My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?