Archive for October, 1998
Have you been looking for a good slang dictionary? Me too. It can be hard to tell, on a cursory inspection, which are reasonably accurate and which are outdated, miss shades of meaning, or are just plain wrong. I've taken to checking a few particular words that I feel reasonably confident I know the current […]
Elliott notes that he was the one who quoted "A plan, a man, a canam: analpa!" to me, but that he heard it from Geoff Hopcraft, who he thinks originated it. Ranjit writes, "By far the best palindrome book I've found, for its clever original palindromes and quirky drawings, is Ana, Nab a Banana by […]
Everyone knows what a palindrome is: a word that reads the same backwards as forwards (except for spaces and punctuation). Maybe the fact that everyone knows about them is why it's taken me a year and a half to get around to writing about them. The most famous palindrome is probably "Madam, I'm Adam." Perhaps […]
In a 1985 column, world's greatest columnist Jon Carroll asked for information about the phrase "I stand before you to sit behind you..." He was deluged with comments. Like many of his correspondents, I had heard a version of the phrase as a child; it's the start of a contradictory nonsense verse. The verse generally […]
I don't know how long people have been coming up with odd names for groups of musical performers, but the practice dates back at least to the 1930s. (Before that there were named musical groups, but the names were usually descriptive (and often place-linked), like "The London Philharmonic Orchestra," rather than fanciful.) Bands with names […]