Back in March this year, a crossword clue in the LA Times read: Word that rhymes with its opposite. The answer in the end was FIRE (rhyming with HIRE), yet the clue sparked a hunt to find other pairs. Limiting the quest to words of one syllable (thus ditching all those CREATE/ANNIHILATE duos), I fudged a dozen-strong [...]
Three weeks away in southeast Asia, and already the rice paddies are waning in the mind’s eye, quicker than the tropical suntan. Thoese fugitive words of Laos and Vietnamese are also working loose: sayanora Sabadi, ciao xin jow. But one keepsake that’s proving harder to shake is my insurance policy, all 29 pages of it. [...]
One small image for mankind, one big pic for this Jacobean blogger. After four years on the airwaves, posting stories and wordsmith whimsy, this mock-magazine marks my first dabble into graphics. Ridiculous, I know. Fred Flinstone would have j-pegged by now, while the Unabomber would surely be mounting browser polls and You Tube snippets, if not blogrolling Anarchy R Us… [...]
Elizabeth Little is the poster girl of grammar. Showing no fear, this young Candian has waded into the world’s dictionaries, seeking out the quirkier rules of language. Stuff like: + how any number after three in Sanskrit,is plenty enough; + the tonal dangers of the Chinese word cao, which depending on your palate can means [...]
Below, the perverse links between two verbal cousins, as first shown in the earlier post, Plume & Plumber: + If you think of radicals as being fundamentalists, then you’ll get the root connection – which also accommodates the radish. + I like this one. Monsters are what we’re warned about. Cave-Dad warned cave-boy about the [...]
Horoscope and sceptic stem from the same root – the Greek to see. So does senate and senile (from senex – in Latin – meaning old man). In the meantime, furnace and fornicate go hand-in-hand, thanks to the red-light archways (or fornix) of old Rome. Such verbal quirks are hiding in a cute book I [...]
What link is shared by Pope Paul IV, vampire actor Bela Lugosi and Australia’s first Prime Minister, Sir Edmund Barton? The answer is supervocalic, a word coined by Scrabble buff Eric Chaikin to describe any word or name that contains all five vowels once only. Think cauliflower and tambourines. Education and Cointreau. Hair Club For [...]
In Riddler tradition, I’ve buried the villain’s answers inside this little ditty: One night, two thieves (Both carry a torch) Tiptoe onto A Russian’s porch. They enter his library For contraband When both plunge Into deep quicksand. Both die in A futile shove, Leaving behind A cotton glove. Ridiculous, but blame the Riddler, and those [...]
Recently been researching The Riddler, that quip-happy psychopath in the Batman canon. And the loon was seriously into puns. What kind of machine has ears, he asked in one episode of the old TV series. A train, with engineers. I’m warning you now. They don’t get much better. The incomparable Frank Gorshin, the physical comic [...]
Ammon Shea dived head-first into all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary (so you and I don’t have to.) The masochist spent a year roaming from A to Zyzzogeton (a leaf-hopping bug of Amazonia), selecting words odd and letabund – filled with joy. Or perverse. Like Leep – to wash with cow-dung and water. [...]