Search Results for: in a word

Screaming at the Ants

Euphemisms for vomiting:

  • Un-eating
  • Number three
  • Vector-spewing
  • Launching lunch
  • Jackson Pollock
  • Eating backwards
  • Parking the tiger
  • Making a crustless pizza
  • Bringing it up for a vote
  • Cooking up a pavement pizza
  • Driving the Buick to Europe
  • Alan’s psychedelic breakfast
  • Yawning for the hearing impaired
  • Yodelling to the porcelain megaphone
  • Talking to God on the big white telephone
  • Paying homage to the Irishman Huey O’Rourke
  • Calling Huey (or Ralph) on the commode-a-phone

Also: horking, yakking, yarfing, yorxing. “Grasp the subject,” wrote Cato, “the words will follow.”

| Language

Deathbed Awkwardness

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html

When you’re busy dying, it can be hard to think of a pithy exit line. Actual last words:

  • Pancho Villa: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
  • Roman emperor Gaius Caligula: “I am still alive!”
  • Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian: “I am about to — or I am going to — die: either expression is correct.”
  • Henrik Ibsen, after his housekeeper told a guest he was feeling better: “On the contrary!”
  • Karl Marx, to his housekeeper, who had just asked whether he had any last words: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
  • British surgeon Joseph Henry Green, after checking his own pulse: “Stopped.”
  • Union general John Sedgwick, sizing up enemy sharpshooters: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist–“

On her way to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette stepped on the executioner’s toe. Her last words were “Pardonez-moi, monsieur.”

| Death

Classifiable?

Autological words describe themselves:

  • pentasyllabic
  • seventeen-lettered
  • descriptive
  • uninformative
  • English
  • pronounceable
  • confusionful
  • wee

Heterological words don’t:

  • abbreviated
  • adverb
  • purple
  • carcinogenic
  • plural
  • phonetic
  • misspelled

So is heterological a heterological word?

| Language

Kadigans

A kadigan is a placeholder for an unspecified word. You know: blivet, deelie-bob, device, dingus, doodad, doohickey, doofunny, doover, fnord, gadget, geemie, gizmo, hoochamajigger, kerjigger, oojah, oojamaflip, thingamajig, thingamabob, thingamadoodle, thingo, thingum, thingummy, thingy, thing-thing, whatchamacallit, whatchamajigger, whatsit, whosey, whoseywhatsit, whosis, widget, whatsitsname.

These are common words that do useful work, but they have no formal part of speech, falling somewhere between nouns and pronouns. “Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly,” wrote William Penn, “for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.”

| Language

Palindromes

Palindromes:

  • Campus motto: Bottoms up, Mac!
  • Do geese see God?
  • Dennis sinned.
  • Name now one man’s sensuousness. Name now one man.
  • Never odd or even.
  • Plan no damn Madonna LP!
  • Rotary gyrator
  • Roy, am I mayor?
  • Sex at noon taxes.
  • Ten animals I slam in a net.
  • Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?
  • Tarzan raised a Desi Arnaz rat.
  • Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.
  • Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.
  • Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
  • Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
  • Rettebs, I flahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better. (Stephen Fry)
  • Rats drown in WordStar.
  • “Sit on a potato pan, Otis!”
  • “Do nine men interpret?” “Nine men,” I nod.
  • A slut nixes sex in Tulsa.

And “Gnu dung, sides reversed, is gnu dung.”

| Language

Dickens and Eliot

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Eliot_3.jpg

A revealing letter of Charles Dickens to George Eliot, 1858:

Dear Sir:

I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humor and the pathos of the stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you, if I had the impertinence to try.

In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator of the sad fortunes of Mr. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one; but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seems to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began. …

| Literature

The Imbeciles

Here’s Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” as rendered by Jean Lescure’s “N+7” procedure, replacing each noun with the seventh following it in a dictionary:

The Imbeciles

I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o’er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.
Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle in the milky whey,
They stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of a day:
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.
The wealths beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key:
A poker could not be but gay,
In such a jocund constancy:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought:
For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
That is the block of turpitude;
And then my heat with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.

Immortal, no? It’s an example of an “oulipo” (“ouvroir de littérature potentielle” or, roughly, “workshop of potential literature”), one of a series of constrained writing techniques invented by French-speaking authors in the 1960s. Art, I suppose, is where you find it.

| Language

The First Blast of the Trumpet

The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) may be the most misogynistic screed ever written:

For who can denie but it is repugneth to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to leade and conduct such as do see? That the weake, the sicke and impotent persons shall norishe and kepe the hole and strong? And finallie, that the foolishe, madde and phrenetike shal governe the discrete and give counsel to such as be sober of mind. And such be al women, compared unto man in bearing of authoritie. For their sight in civile regiment is but blindness; their strength, weaknes; their counsel, foolishnes; and judgment, phrensie, if it be rightlie considered.

That’s ironic, because the author’s real beef was religious: John Knox opposed female sovereigns like Mary, Queen of Scots, and Mary Tudor because of their Catholicism. When Elizabeth Tudor succeeded Mary, his plan backfired — she was sympathetic to his cause, but offended at his words. Hell hath no fury.

| Literature · Oddities

The Great Gadsby

Gadsby is a 50,000-word novel that doesn’t use the letter E:

“But a man has to think of that, Allan. And you will, as you grow up. My two big sons just put off on that big troop train. I don’t know how long Bill and Julius will stay away. Your big cannon might go Boom! and hit Bill or Julius. Do you know Frank Morgan, Paul Johnson and John Smith? All right; that big cannon might hit that trio, too. Nobody can say who a cannon will hit, Allan. Now, you go right on through Grammar School, and grow up into a big strong man, and don’t think about war;” and Gadsby, standing and gazing far off to Branton Hills’ charming hill district, thought: “I think that will bust up a wild young ambition!”

The author, Ernest Vincent Wright, notes that he could mention no numbers between 6 and 30. And “When introducing young ladies into the story, this is a real barrier; for what young woman wants to have it known that she is over thirty?”

| Language · Oddities