National Spelling Bee winning words:
- 1995: xanthosis
- 1996: vivisepulture
- 1997: euonym
- 1998: chiaroscurist
- 1999: logorrhea
- 2000: demarche
- 2001: succedaneum
- 2002: prospicience
- 2003: pococurante
- 2004: autochthonous
Search Results for: in a word
Yikes
Unusual phobias:
- albuminurophobia: fear of kidney disease
- alliumphobia: fear of garlic
- allodoxaphobia: fear of opinions
- ancraophobia: fear of wind
- anuptaphobia: fear of staying single
- arachibutyrophobia: fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
- atomosophobia: fear of atomic explosions
- aulophobia: fear of flutes
- aurophobia: fear of gold
- barophobia: fear of gravity
- caligynephobia: fear of beautiful women
- cherophobia: fear of gaiety
- deipnophobia: fear of dining or dinner conversations
- euphobia: fear of hearing good news
- geniophobia: fear of chins
- genuphobia: fear of knees
- hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: fear of long words
- linonophobia: fear of string
- lutraphobia: fear of otters
- mottephobia: fear of moths
- porphyrophobia: fear of the color purple
- pteronophobia: fear of being tickled by feathers
- scriptophobia: fear of writing in public
- spheksophobia: fear of wasps
- zemmiphobia: fear of the great mole rat
Politicophobia is defined as “abnormal” dislike of politicians.
Also Abstemiously
The shortest word containing six unique vowels in alphabetical order is facetiously.
Subcontinental has them in reverse order.
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.”
Deathbed Awkwardness
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.”
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?
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.”
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.”
Dickens and Eliot
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. …
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.