Students are sometimes taught never to use the same word twice in a sentence. This can lead to trouble: If a writer uses a synonym merely to avoid repeating a word, the reader can be left wondering whether there’s some significance in the change. H.W. Fowler called this affliction elegant variation and added, “There are few literary faults so widely prevalent.” He gives some examples:

The Bohemian Diet will be the second Parliament to elect women deputies, for Sweden already has several lady deputies.

Mr. John Redmond has just now a path to tread even more thorny than that which Mr. Asquith has to walk.

“What has Bohemia done that its females should be mere women?” Fowler asks. “And can Mr. Asquith really have taught himself to walk without treading?”

Charles W. Morton called this the “elongated yellow fruit” school of writing, after a famous second reference to a banana in the Boston Evening Transcript. (Sub-editors at the Guardian began using the term “povs” after one writer referred to carrots as “popular orange vegetables.”) Morton cited some further examples:

billiard balls = “the numbered spheroids”
Bluebeard = “the azure-whiskered wifeslayer”
Easter egg hunt = “hen-fruit safari”
milk = “lacteal fluid”
oysters = “succulent bivalves”
peanut = “the succulent goober”
songbird = “avian songster”
truck = “rubber-tired mastodon of the highway”

In A Slight Sense of Outrage, Morton wrote that the sin “lies somewhere between the cliché and the ‘fine writing’ so dreaded by teachers of English Composition. … It does bespeak an author who wishes to seem knowledgeable, and versatile. … It can also bespeak an author who is merely pompous.”

William Hone’s Every-Day Book of 1837 repeats a story in which St. Martin meets the devil, who asks why he is walking to Rome rather than riding. The saint commands him to become a beast of burden, the devil assumes the shape of a mule, and Martin jumps onto his back and spurs him on his way by repeatedly making the sign of the cross. At length the devil says:

Signa te, Signa: temere me tangis et angis:
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.

That means “Cross, cross thyself — thou plaguest and vexest me without necessity; for, owing to my exertions, Rome, the object of thy wishes, will soon be near.” And each line is a palindrome, reading the same backward and forward.

Hone adds, “These lines have been quoted imperfectly and separately in ‘Encyclopedies’ and other books, under the words ‘Palindromical verses;’ but the reader will not easily meet with the legendary tale, which gives them historical consistence and meaning.”

poecilonym

n. a synonym for synonym

In the Ubang language of Nigeria, men and women speak different languages. They understand each other perfectly, but “It’s almost like two different lexicons,” says anthropologist Chi Chi Undie. “There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, then there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don’t sound alike, they don’t have the same letters, they are completely different words”:

Raised by their mothers and other women, boys grow up speaking the female language, but at age 10 they’re expected to switch, unbidden, to the male. “There is a stage the male will reach and he discovers he is not using his rightful language,” says Chief Oliver Ibang. “Nobody will tell him he should change to the male language. … When he starts speaking the men language, you know the maturity is coming into him.”

“God created Adam and Eve and they were Ubang people,” he says. He had planned to give two languages to each ethnic group, but after the giving two to the Ubang he realized there were not enough languages to continue. “So he stopped. That’s why Ubang has the benefit of two languages — we are different from other people in the world.”