The Korean alphabet was designed expressly to increase literacy among the country’s uneducated lower classes, who found traditional Chinese characters hard to recognize and understand. King Sejong the Great promulgated the new letters in 1444 to permit the common people to express themselves conveniently in writing.
It’s said that “a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over, and even a stupid man can learn them in the space of 10 days.”
tracasserie
n. a state of disturbance or annoyance
infamation
n. reproach
alienigenate
adj. born in a foreign country
baragouin
n. language so altered in sound or sense as not to be generally understood
‘It is a fact,’ wrote Stephen Spender, after trying to write a book about interwar Berlin, ‘that all the best German jokes are unconscious.’ He instanced the expostulation of the German conductor Hans Richter after a difficult rehearsal with the London Philharmonic Orchestra: ‘Up with your damned nonsense will I put twice, or perhaps once, but sometimes always, by God, never!’
— Paul Johnson, Humorists, 2011
In his 1967 book Beyond Language, Dmitri Borgmann points out that every permutation of the three words ONE, MAY, and SAW produces a valid English sentence:
- ONE MAY SAW. (An individual has the privilege of performing the action of sawing some object, such as a wooden log.)
- ONE SAW MAY. (One person saw the girl whose first name is ‘May’.)
- MAY ONE SAW? (Is one permitted to saw wood?)
- MAY SAW ONE. (A girl named ‘May’ saw some object, previously mentioned, that is regarded as belonging to a group of objects of like character.)
- SAW ONE, MAY! (Cut a log of wood in half, May, by sawing through it!)
- SAW MAY ONE! (Saw a log of wood for May, Buster!)
In Word Ways, David Morice notes that BILL, PAT, and SUE can produce 12 valid three-word sentences, distinguished by capitalization and comma placement. Each item in the first group corresponds in meaning to one in the second:
Bill, pat Sue. Pat Sue, Bill. Bill, sue Pat. Sue Pat, Bill. Sue, bill Pat. Bill Pat, Sue. Sue, pat Bill. Pat Bill, Sue. Pat, bill Sue. Bill Sue, Pat. Pat, sue Bill. Sue Bill, Pat.
(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 26:2 [May 1993], 105-117.)
(Thanks, Colin and Joseph.)
Two hundred kilometers west of Pretoria is a farm called Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein. The name, the longest place name in South Africa, means “the spring where two buffaloes were shot stone dead with one shot.”
As a daughter language of Dutch, Afrikaans is capable of almost endless compounding, at least in principle. In his 1982 Total Book of South African Records, Eric Rosenthal claims that the longest word in the language is Tweedehandsemotorverkoopsmannevakbondstakingsvergaderingsameroeperstoespraakskrywerspersverklaringuitreikingsmediakonferensieaankondiging, “issuable media conference’s announcement at a press release regarding the convener’s speech at a secondhand car dealership union’s strike meeting.” But, as with many such records, the word was contrived expressly and is not in common use.
aegritude
n. an instance of sickness
Utah senator Jake Garn got so comprehensively ill on the space shuttle Discovery in 1985 that he’s remembered in the Garn scale, an informal measure of space sickness. Astronaut Robert Stevenson recalled:
Jake Garn was sick, was pretty sick. I don’t know whether we should tell stories like that. But anyway, Jake Garn, he has made a mark in the Astronaut Corps because he represents the maximum level of space sickness that anyone can ever attain, and so the mark of being totally sick and totally incompetent is one Garn. Most guys will get maybe to a tenth Garn if that high. And within the Astronaut Corps, he forever will be remembered by that.
Garn said, “I’ve been very proud of the fact that they named something after me after all these years, even if it was unofficial.”
Hong Kong contains a street named Rednaxela Terrace. It’s hard not to notice that this is Alexander spelled backward, but the origin of the name is uncertain.
In Signs of a Colonial Era (2009), Andrew Yanne and Gillis Heller claim that the street had been named Alexander Terrace after its original owner but that a clerk recorded the name backward, as the Chinese language was written right to left at the time.
Another possibility is that the name is linked to New York abolitionist Robert Alexander Young’s 1829 pamphlet Ethiopian Manifesto, which contains the name Rednaxela.
Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle is written in his famously tortured syntax:
It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly.
James Thurber parodied this with “The Beast in the Dingle”:
He had brought himself so fully in the end, poor Grantham, to accept his old friend’s invitation to accompany her to an ‘afternoon’ at ‘Cornerbright’ that now, on the very porch of the so evident house, he could have, for his companion, in all surrender, a high, fine — there was no other word for it — twinkle.
Thurber originally called this “The Return of the Screw.” See Homage and A Prose Maze.
ventifact
n. a stone shaped by windblown sand
