The appropriate word here is “Bleeaagh.” In 897, Pope Stephen VI dug up the decomposing body of his predecessor and put it on trial for violating church law. Formosus, who had been dead for nine months, was found guilty and buried again. Rome turned against Stephen, who was eventually strangled in prison. It’s known as the cadaver synod or, in Latin, the “synodus horrenda.”
National Spelling Bee winning words:
Unusual phobias:
Politicophobia is defined as “abnormal” dislike of politicians.
The shortest word containing six unique vowels in alphabetical order is facetiously.
Subcontinental has them in reverse order.
Euphemisms for vomiting:
Also: horking, yakking, yarfing, yorxing. “Grasp the subject,” wrote Cato, “the words will follow.”
When you’re busy dying, it can be hard to think of a pithy exit line. Actual last words:
On her way to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette stepped on the executioner’s toe. Her last words were “Pardonez-moi, monsieur.”
Autological words describe themselves:
Heterological words don’t:
So is heterological a heterological word?
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.”
Palindromes:
And “Gnu dung, sides reversed, is gnu dung.”
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. …