imparlibidinous
adj. pertaining to an unequal state of desire between two people
Language
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?
What’s in a Name?
In the seventeenth century, André Pujom, finding that his name spelled Pendu à Riom, fulfilled his destiny by cutting somebody’s throat in Auvergne, and was actually hung at Riom, the seat of justice in that province.
— William Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
In a Word
inkle
v. to attend a party to which one has not been invited
Don’t Call Us
American philologist Revilo P. Oliver had a palindromic name — it reads the same backward and forward. In his family, he said, the name “has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.”
And it cost him — at least one journal rejected his articles as fraudulent.
In a Word
saulie
n. a hired mourner at a funeral
Two in One
GATEMAN, sides reversed, is NAMETAG.
And that sentence is a palindrome.
Letter Shift
In a Word
dyscallignia
n. the dislike of beautiful women
A Universal Solution
In 1965, Dmitri Borgmann noted that this expression:
11 + 2 – 1 = 12
… is valid also when interpreted as a set of characters:
11 “+ 2” = 112; 112 “- 1” = 12
… as a set of Roman numerals:
XI + II = XIII; XIII – I = XII
… and even as a set of letters:
ELEVEN + TWO = ELEVENTWO
ELEVENTWO – ONE = LEVETW (= TWELVE)