“Ludicrous Words”

Skip the BS

by Skip Eisiminger

“I have searched for Eve in the hagiographies without success.”

—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—3/8/10—Surely most Sunday school graduates know that Genesis begins in wordplay: Adam introduces himself to the creature bloodlessly excised from his flank saying, “Madam, I’m Adam,” and his quivering mate shyly replies, “Eve.” (I should say that I’m consulting a very rare edition of the Bible that’s long out of print.) From this brief introduction, the complexity multiplies. The serpent, the embodiment of evil, is live. Get it? Some call such an odd pair a semordnilap. Get it?  When Jehovah sends the first two humans out of Eden, He utters the shortest sentence possible in English, “Go!” He might have palindromicly added, “Am I as stupid and impetuous as you are?” but Jehovah is not a deity to renege on His word, so the sentence went uncommuted.

Once the precedent was established, Eve’s descendants started collecting miscellanea as if they were shards of the Holy Grail. Here is a dollop of my own collection:

dollop: A delicious invertogram.

kinnikinnik: A ground cover in the American Northwest also known as “bear-berry.” It’s the longest single-word palindrome in Webster’s Third International.

NOON: A mirror palindrome.

TOOT: An “inside-out” word which yields OTTO.

MAT: A word that is vertically symmetrical.

DOCK: A word that is horizontally symmetrical.

OX: A word that is horizontally and vertically symmetrical.

dust: One of about 30 English contranyms, a word that means one thing and its opposite as in, “Dust the mantle, Jeeves, and then dust the tomato vines.”

baloney, balony, bologna, bologny, boloney: The only word with one pronunciation that has five alternate spellings.

dord: An example of a ghost word (in this case meaning “density”) invented by lexicographers to see if anyone is stealing their data base.

Elvis: An anagram for lives, need I say more? For those still on his trail, he’s probably wearing Levis.

I: The most common word in English, and a reflection of our gargantuan egos. The Germans never have understood why we capitalize it.

TWENTY-NINE: An eerie word made with 29 straight strokes of the pen. The Germans quibble with that hyphen.

queueing: The longest common word with five vowels in a row—you’d go broke buying vowels for this word. I cannot blame those who prefer queuing.

archaeoaeolotropic: The longest word in English with six vowels in a row. It means “a piece of ancient material that is not equally elastic when pulled in different directions.”

abstemiously: One of a handful of words with all six vowels in alphabetical order.

squirrelled: The longest one-syllable word in English meaning “saved” or “hamstered.”

-ough: With nine ways to pronounce it, this is the most flexible syllable in the language. Try saying aloud: “A rough, dough-faced, but thoughtful ploughman, strode the streets of Scarborough. After falling in a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

billowy: The longest common word whose letters are all in alphabetical order.

cuspidor: The most beautiful word in the language according to James Joyce, a writer to whom context meant little. Wilfred Funk nominated asphodel, but I prefer the punchier spork.

smegma: The most disgusting word in the language, meaning a secretion of the mammalian genitals. Apparently, the Los Angeles experimental noise group with the same name agrees.

thousand: The first number word to use an “a.”

therein: The seven-letter word with the most English words contained therein without altering the order of the letters. See if you can find all ten.

deeded: The longest third-order isogram, a word in this case with three e’s and three d’s.

frillless: The shortest word with three identical consonants in a row; as often as I have written this word, I still think it needs a hyphen.

language: The answer to the old riddle: “Think of three words ending in –gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third? The word is something everyone uses every day.”

pumpernickel: The best etymology ever; in German it’s the bread that makes one “pass wind like the devil.”

set: The English word that has the most definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary has 26 pages worth!

floccinaucinihilipilification: The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary meaning “the action or habit of estimating as worthless.”

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis: A synonym for silicosis, as if it needed one. It’s also the longest word in Webster’s Third International and means a lung disease caused by volcanic dust. There’s also a 1,913-letter-long chemical name, but that has not made it into any dictionary, and that is as it should be.

Nymphs vex, beg quick fjord waltz: The shortest pangraph or sentence with 27 letters using all 26 letters, but who spells the Swedish Ford with a j? Fame and wealth await the word-spinner who can eliminate that extra e.

07734: An upside-down and backward number word assuming the “4” has no diagonal, but my font selection is limited—“Damn it to 7734!”

squinched and strengths: The two longest words pronounced as single syllables.

rhythms: The longest word without an a, e, i, o, or u.

she: Named by the American Dialect Society the “word of the millennium,” 1000-2000, because Old English did not have a third-person personal pronoun exclusively for women before about AD 1200.

jazz: Named by the A.D.S. the best new word of 1900-2000.

web: Named by the A.D.S. the best new word of 1990-2000.

mix: The largest Roman numeral word, which is worth 1,009.

Wood

John

Mass: A rebus, or a representation of a word, phrase, or in this case an address by pictures, symbols, or in this case the placement of the words. Supposedly, a letter addressed as shown was delivered to John Underwood of Andover, Massachusetts. Since there is no street listed, I assume the postman knew this fellow or Andover was very small.

zyzzyva: The last word in any major dictionary; it’s an American weevil.

Leonardo da Vinci, Roberto Guatelli speculated, simultaneously drew with his right hand even as he was writing backwards with the left. It’s the only way this contemporary scholar could imagine the famed painter-sculptor-engineer accomplishing all that he did. In other words, Dan Brown got it all wrong! Leonardo was not a descendant of Mary Magdalene, wife of Jesus; he was a child of Eve, the matron saint of all who see words as keys to locks. But these are no ordinary locks, as I have tried to show above.  These have tumblers worthy of the savants among us.

(This article in a slightly different format originally appeared in Vocabula, Dec. 2009.)