Archive for 1997
Willard Espy didn't bother to define Tom Swifties in his Almanac(s) of Words at Play; perhaps he felt everyone knew what they were. I'm sure that there are some people who haven't encountered them, though, so I'll start with a quick definition. A Tom Swifty is a pun of this form: "I never get blisters; […]
Pierre Abbat was the first to catch my mistaken identification of "pork" as a rhymeless word; he provided this fine set of culinary guidelines: One never eats pork With spoon or with fork Or camel or stork Or eagle or bat Or coney or cat Or rabbit or rat. One may eat cricket But not […]
"Slovenly rhyming is one of the sure signs of mediocrity in versification." —Clement Wood, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary There seems to be a bit of confusion out there over what exactly constitutes rhyme in English. But before I can talk about rhyme, I have to talk about syllable stress. [Momentary pause for obligatory stress jokes […]
The typewriter keyboard used almost universally in America (and with some variations throughout much of the world) was created by Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and S. W. Soule around 1870. It's sometimes known as the Universal keyboard, but perhaps more commonly known as the QWERTY keyboard, after the first six letters in the upper […]
Thanks to alert reader/contributor Mya Rorer for pointing out a typo in this column (now fixed). If any of you other readers notice typos in any of the columns, please let me know. (Last updated: 27 October 1997) Back to column P
Now and then one feels inspired to feast upon morally uplifting poetry that one can really sink one's teeth into—great classical works from the Western canon, perhaps, such as Paradise Lost or "The Song of Hiawatha." Then again, sometimes ya just wanna kick back and relax with a light-verse snack. If you're in the mood […]
Jim Moskowitz points out that the phrase "pull out all the stops" originally referred to pulling the stop knobs of a musical organ. But stops are still in use on organs (though non-electronic organs are relatively rare), and the phrase may again be more a metaphor than an obsolescism. The search continues. (Last updated: 10 […]
I recently heard an anecdote that involved a teenager seeing a rotary telephone and not knowing what it was. Similarly, there's a funny scene in the movie In and Out in which a supermodel runs afoul of a rotary phone. In both cases, the idea was that although rotary telephones still exist, they've been largely […]
Note: An earlier version of #14 went: "Fourteen sophomoric, soporific supper songs that sound like this: [roughly to the tune of "The Mexican Hat Dance"] A crew of crabs with croup / Is cooking a cockroach soup / Lolita's lethal goop / Will make your gut loop-de-loop / Fibonacci's Apache hibachi / Manned by murmuring […]
Various memory-related games involve reciting a list of items; each time you recite the list, you add a new item to it. The act of reciting the full list each time makes it much easier to remember the entire list as it grows. Some years back, Ed Cook taught us a list of eleven items […]