Archive for 1: lowercase 1
Jim Moskowitz suggests "He missed his wife and the train." Pierre Abbat contributes a Biblical quotation: "Eutychus fell asleep from a third story window." (Acts 20:9) He adds: "By the way, the plural of zeugma is zeugmata, not zeugmae. Nouns ending in -ma in Greek, -men in Latin, -mya in Russian, and -man in Sanskrit […]
"Zeugma" is one of my favorite words. It would probably be my very favorite word if only it were pronounced /'zOig m@/ (as I assumed when I first saw it) instead of /'zug m@/, a pronunciation that seems boring compared to the spelling. (For a pronunciation key, see column k or the ASCII IPA page.) […]
Two I neglected to mention: A termite walks into a bar and asks, "Where's the bar maid?" (...bar tender...) Two men walk into a pipe. You'd think the second one would've seen it. (...walk into a bar...) (Last updated: 3 September 1998) Back to column y
A "secret yet" is a short phrase or riddle involving a pun, in which the punning word has been replaced by a synonym (and is therefore no longer a pun). They're funny in an odd sort of way—they seem completely mundane, or incomprehensible, until you realize that they used to be puns, that they're sort […]
About two months ago, my email yielded up the best Gilbert & Sullivan filk/parody I've ever encountered. Fortunately, one doesn't need to know much about the television series Xena: Warrior Princess to appreciate the dazzling wordplay and wit here; like all the best modern productions of Gilbert & Sullivan, this piece contains extensive footnotes explaining […]
A reader who prefers to remain anonymous tells me that "sastruga" comes from the Russian word "zastruga," meaning "groove." (I have got to get a decent dictionary; I oughtn't to have to ask readers about etymologies.) Treesong confirms that the source of "sastruga" is Russian and adds that the plural is "zastrugi," which sounds to […]
Some of the loveliest and most interesting words I know are wind-related words, from the hot humid desert-born sirocco to the gentle susurrus of the zephyr. We've gained quite a few such words from roots in other languages; people all over the world have names for their winds. The word "zephyr," for instance, comes from […]
There's a game I learned in fifth grade that I've never encountered since; lacking any other name for it, I call it "Fives." One player (the chooser) picks a five-letter word with no repeating letters and draws five long dashes, one blank for each letter. The other players attempt to guess the chosen word. Each […]
Carrie Cate supplies a code language (of unknown name) that her sister used to speak, involving spelling out words but adding "-ong" to each consonant. Her example: "I hong o pong e yong o u cong a nong u nong dong e rong song tong a nong dong tong hong i song." I particularly like […]
A lot of people from my generation will never forget one of Boston's ZIP codes. If you aren't in your late twenties to mid-thirties but know someone who is, try telling such a person, "Send it to ZOOM!" Chances are fairly good that they'll chant, "Box three five oh, Bos-ton Mass, ohhh, two oooone, three […]