End to End

Read word by word, this sentence is a palindrome:

Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.

From a New Statesman competition:

Women understand men; few men understand women.
God knows man. What is doubtful is what man knows God.
Does milk machinery milk does?
Bores are people that say that people are bores.

A few more.

08/22/2026 UPDATE: From Walt Kelly’s comic Pogo:

Smile, wavering wings,
Above rains pour,
While hopefully sings
Love of shorn shore.

Shore shorn of love
Sings hopefully while,
Pour rains above,
Wings wavering, smile.

(“I don’t git it.” “That’s the clever part. It’s gotta be read backward.”)

(Thanks, David.)

| Language

Having Words

It’s said that Samuel Johnson resorted to unconventional methods to win a debate with a Billingsgate fishwife:

He called her a noun, a pronoun, an adverb, and she hesitated. He vigorously charged her with being conjunction and preposition. She wavered. And when at length with stentorian voice he accused her to her face of being a parallelopipedon, she broke in disorder and fled in the utmost confusion.

(Frederic Coudert, “Lying as a Fine Art,” 1873.)

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Around the World

A brainteaser from the British intelligence agency GCHQ:

Explain the following: falkun, home de guerra, kick, lavoro, moed, mosca, raccordement, schafer, stobhach, tre, zevk.

Click for Answer
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In a Word

intendiment
n. intention or purpose

auspicate
v. to begin an undertaking

mercation
n. the act of purchasing something

Alnaschar
n. a person given to unrealistic dreams, expectations, or plans

In the summer of 1967, the Beatles briefly considered buying a set of Greek islands where they could live and work together.

“We were all going to live together now, in a huge estate,” Derek Taylor says in Anthology. “The four Beatles and Brian [Epstein] would have their network at the centre of the compound: a dome of glass and iron tracery (not unlike the old Crystal Palace) above the mutual creative/play area, from which arbours and avenues would lead off like spokes from a wheel to the four vast and incredibly beautiful separate living units. In the outer grounds, the houses of the inner clique: Neil [Aspinall], Mal [Evans], Terry [Doran] and Derek, complete with partners, families and friends.”

John, Paul, and George got as far as touring the islands south of Athens and visiting one they considered buying. But indulging the idea for an afternoon seemed to be enough for them. George said, “We got back on the boat and sailed away, and never thought about the island again.”

“It’s a good job we didn’t do it,” Paul said later, “because anyone who tried those ideas realised eventually there would always be arguments, there would always be who has to do the washing-up and whose turn it is to clean out the latrines. I don’t think any of us were thinking of that.”

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In Short

A letter from the king’s minister of finance to Zenon of Kaunos, a public official in Ptolemaic Egypt, 256 B.C.:

Apollonius to Zenon, greeting. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell.

In The Complete Plain Words, his 1948 style guide for the British civil service, Sir Ernest Gowers calls this a model of concision.

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Blow by Blow

For Song of the Sky (1954), Guy Murchie collected the names of winds around the world — he calls them “among the least known and most beautiful of words”:

Leste — warm easterly wind of January in the Madeiras
Naalehu — of Hawaii, blowing from the arid interior areas
Soo-oop-wa — bitter sand-laden wind of Southwest Africa
Steppenwind — of Germany blowing from the steppes
Bise — cold wind of France
Southerly burster — of Australia, preceded by an eerie lull
Tramontana — Alpine blast of the Italian east coast
Etesian — of cool summer afternoons in Greece and Levant
Siffanto — up from the hot heel of Italy
Kai — balmy south wind of China
Yamo oroshi — foehn of the steep valleys of Japan
Klod — Balinese wind that blows “downwards to the sea”
Reshabar — lusty and black, out of the high Caucasus
Mistral — down from the Cevennes to the Riviera
Ghost of Gouda — local gust on a calm night, South Africa
Vinds-gnyr — ancient blustery wind of Iceland
Wisper — whistling through narrow Rhine valleys
Imbat — refreshing North African shores
Virazon — cooling Montevideo on summer afternoons
Sz — first faint breeze of the Chinese autumn
Elephanta — of the Malabar coast

“Herodotus tells of the ancient people of Psylli (Tripoli) who became so hysterical when their wells dried up that they actually dclared war on the simoom and marched into the Sahara with clashing cymbals and beating drums until they disappeared forever into a red cloud of whirling sand.”

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In a Word

locodescriptive
adj. describing a particular place or places

hippocrepiform
adj. shaped like a horseshoe

elsewhither
adv. in a different direction

mirific
adj. working wonders; wonderful

The Rochester Institute of Technology contains a portal to another dimension. In 2013, student Michael Lacanilao deliberately set out to create a record of an “Escherian stairwell” on campus that forms a perpetual downward loop.

Lacanilao has long since graduated, but the stairwell is still commemorated on the school’s website.

(Thanks, Colin.)

| Hoaxes · Language · Oddities

Limerick

Said a boy to his teacher one day,
“Wright has not written rite right, I say.”
And the teacher replied,
As the error she eyed,
“Right! Wright: Write rite right, right away!”

| Language · Poems

Elemental Words

In the February 1971 issue of Word Ways, Mary J. Youngquist pointed out that when element symbols are expanded, SATED becomes SULFURATED and FEY becomes IRONY.

That August, she, Philip Cohen, and Murray Pearce extended the list:

FEED = IRONED
AGED = SILVERED
SIC = SULFURIC
SNED = TINED
SNY = TINY
SOUS = SULFUROUS
SET = SULFURET
SING = SULFURING
SIZING = SULFURIZING
CUED = COPPERED

Likewise, BASIS yields BASILICONS, NAZI yields NEONAZI (and then NEONEONEONAZI, and so on forever), and RES can yield either RHENIUMS or RESULFUR.

07/09/2026 UPDATE: A number of readers point out that NAZI doesn’t work, as the symbol for neon is Ne. But JAR = JARGON! (Thanks Paul.)

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