Second Senses

Entries from the Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary:

beehive: what Australian teachers tell you to do
blistering: someone you enjoy calling on the phone
cannelloni: Scots refusal to give one an overdraft
cherish: rather like a chair
colliery: sort of like a collie but even more so
emboss: to promote to the top
female: chemical name for Iron Man
flatulence: an emergency vehicle that picks you up after you have been run over by a steamroller
Icelander: to tell lies about Apple
ivy: the Roman for four
lamb shank: Sean Connery’s sheep has drowned
laundress: grass skirt
pastrami: the art of meat folding
quick: noise made by a New Zealand duck
splint: to run very fast with a broken leg
Venezuela: a gondola with a harpoon
wisteria: a nostalgic form of panic
xylophone: the Greek goddess of Scrabble

A foible is “something coughed up by a New York cat.”

| Humor · Language

A Pretty Find

Write the word CESAROLITE in a circle and then trace out the letters in its anagram ESOTERICAL — the result is a perfect 10-pointed star:

https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/rmm-2025-0002
Image: RMM

Only 5.7 percent of anagrams in English are “maximally shuffled,” meaning that no letter retains its original neighbors. And even those rarely produce such pleasing symmetry when they’re diagramed like this. This is the largest “perfect” star anagram found in a systematic search by Jason Parker and Dan Barker; for more, see the link below.

(Jason Parker and Dan Barker, “Star Anagram Detection and Classification,” Recreational Mathematics Magazine 12:20 [June 2025], 19-40.)

| Language · Science & Math

Hypertension

New English verb tenses, offered by David Morice in a November 1986 Word Ways article:

Future past perfect: I will have had walked
Progressive conditional: I would have should have been walking
Future present past: He will does walked
Double future: He will will walk
Unconditional present: He could can walk
Obsessive progressive: He is being doing walking
Refractive future perfect: He did will was have walked
Superjunctive: He might be having been about to be walking

The Tortoise stepped ever so carefully across the finish line, just a moment before the Hare would have been about to be going to hop across it himself. ‘I won!’ she said. The Hare paused a moment, then replied, ‘Yes, Ms. Tortoise, in the next decade you will have been about to be going to be used to be having been doing being the winner of this race, but tomorrow we’ll have to do it again, for it’s two out of three, ma’am.’

| Language

The Perfect Infinitive

“Let us take a typical case. A gentleman and his wife, calling on friends, find them not at home. The gentleman decides to leave a note of regret couched in a few well-chosen words, and the first thing he knows he is involved in this:

We would have liked to have found you in.

“Reading it over, the gentleman is assailed by the suspicion that he has too many ‘haves,’ and that the whole business has somehow been put too far into the past. … He takes an envelope out of his pocket and grimly makes a list of all the possible combinations, thus getting:”

  • We would have liked to have found
  • We would have liked to find
  • We would like to have found
  • We would like to find
  • We had hoped to have been able to have found

“If he has married the right kind of woman, she will hastily scratch a brief word on a calling card, shove it under the door, and drag her husband away.”

— James Thurber, “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage,” 1931

| Language

And They’re Off

Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:

  • Bates Motel
  • Disco Inferno
  • Up Your Assets
  • Race Horse
  • Crashing Bore
  • English Muffin
  • Leo Pity Me
  • Cold Shower
  • T.V. Doubletalk
  • Ranikaboo
  • Holy Cats
  • Hadn’t Orter
  • Strong Strong
  • Honeybunny Boo

After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”

This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end:

| Language

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hardwick_Hall_3_(7027835143).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

scattergood
n. a person who spends money wastefully

Built in the 16th century to flaunt its owner’s wealth, Hardwick Hall, in Derbyshire, boasted large windows when glass was a luxury. Children called it “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.”

Unfortunately, writes Stephen Eskilson in The Age of Glass (2018), “a cold day saw the chimneys of Hardwick Hall drawing cold air through the drafty windows and circulating it again to the outside,” “a sui generis example of thermal inefficiency.”

| History · Language · Technology

Family Plan

Given names of the 11 children of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Russell of Vinton, Ohio, 1972:

  • Noel Leon
  • Novel Levon
  • Norwood Doowron
  • Nerol Loren
  • Leron Norel
  • Noble Elbon
  • Lledo Odell
  • Laur Rual
  • Loneva Avenol
  • Lebanna Annabel
  • Leah Hael

“Mother did it, but I don’t know why,” Laur told UPI. “She would take names from the Bible and other books and compare them until they came out that way.”

Bonus palindrome item: Volume 1, Issue 5 of Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, titled “Fearful Symmetry,” is a deliberately contrived visual palindrome, not just in structure but often within individual panels (designed by artist Dave Gibbons). Pedro Ribeiro shows the correspondences here.

| Art · Language · Oddities

Inspiration

Anna Rabinowitz’s 80-page poem Darkling is an acrostic of Thomas Hardy’s 1900 poem “The Darkling Thrush” — taking the first letter of each line in Rabinowitz’s poem spells out Hardy’s.

“I found myself … haunted by ‘The Darkling Thrush,'” she said, “by its tone of millennial mourning, by its note of hope in the thrush’s song, and most especially by its opening line which situates the poet at he meditates on the passing century: ‘I leant upon a coppice gate.'”

| Language · Poems