moonglade
n. the reflection of moonlight on a body of water

he bested his opponent, he worsted his opponent

But they’re antonyms when used as adjectives, adverbs, or nouns:

the best player, the worst player

it best suits his skills, it worst suits his skills

I am the best, I am the worst

William James wrote, “Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.”

Harold Ross personally edited every issue of the New Yorker between 1925 and 1951. Unfortunately, he was a fiend for commas, peppering every sentence until all possible ambiguity was removed. An example from 1948:

“When I read, the other day, in the suburban-news section of a Boston newspaper, of the death of Mrs. Abigail Richardson Sawyer (as I shall call her), I was, for the moment, incredulous, for I had always thought of her as one of nature’s indestructibles.”

His writers hated this. James Thurber revised Wordsworth:

She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.

And E.B White wrote, “Commas in the New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”

But Ross was immovable. “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here,” he acknowledged to H.L. Mencken, “probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.”

So on it went. A correspondent once asked Thurber why Ross had added the comma to the sentence “After dinner, the men went into the living-room.” Thurber responded, “This particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

father-better
adj. surpassing one’s father

father-waur
adj. worse than one’s father

– Henry Cholmondeley-Pennell, Puck on Pegasus, 1868

What is gopher wood? Noah used it to build his ark, but there’s no other reference to it in the Bible.

Similarly, no one’s quite sure what a kankedort is. It appears in one passage in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:

Was Troilus nought in a kankedort,
That lay, and myghte whisprynge of hem here,
And thoughte, “O Lord, right now renneth my sort
Fully to deye, or han anon comfort!”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it helplessly as an awkward situation or affair and says it’s “of unascertained etymology.”

See Hapax Legomenon.

PARDON IMPOSSIBLE, TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA.

The man appealed to the czar’s wife, who transposed the comma:

PARDON, IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SENT TO SIBERIA.

The prisoner was released.

The actress Minnie Maddern Fiske once found this message attached to the mirror in her dressing room:

MARGARET ANGLIN SAYS MRS. FISKE IS THE BEST ACTRESS IN AMERICA.

She returned it to Anglin, who found she had added two commas:

MARGARET ANGLIN, SAYS MRS. FISKE, IS THE BEST ACTRESS IN AMERICA.