zetetic
adj. proceeding by inquiry

astucious
adj. subtle; cunning; astute

consectary
adj. following logically

‘Who did you pass on the road?’ the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay.

‘Nobody,’ said the Messenger.

‘Quite right,’ said the King: ‘this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.’

‘I do my best,’ the Messenger said in a sulky tone. ‘I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do!’

‘He can’t do that,’ said the King, ‘or else he’d have been here first.’

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871

-ESS changes POET to POETESS, -ETTE changes BACHELOR to BACHELORETTE, -INA changes CZAR to CZARINA, and -INE changes HERO to HEROINE. What suffix changes a word from feminine to masculine?

Lexicon Recentis Latinitas, published by the Vatican, invents Latin versions of modern words and phrases, so students can refer to items that didn’t exist in the ancient world:

bestseller: liber maxime divenditus
car wash: autocinetorum lavatrix
Christmas tree: arbor natalicia
disc brakes: sufflamen disci forma
dishwasher: escariorum lavator
to flirt: lusorie amare
leased property: locatio in emptionem convertibilis
pinball machine: sphaeriludium electricum nomismate actum
refrigerator: cella frigorifera
to slack off on the job: neglegenter operor
television: instrumentum televisificum
traffic jam: fluxus interclusio
washing machine: machina linteorum lavatoria

These examples are from a selection published in 1991 in Harper’s, which said that 75 percent of the 18,000 entries in that year’s edition were terms that had never had Latin equivalents. I can’t find the whole book, but the Vatican website offers an Italian-Latin glossary with some entries in English (hot pants are brevíssimae bracae femíneae).

New English verb tenses, offered by David Morice in a November 1986 Word Ways article:

Future past perfect: I will have had walked
Progressive conditional: I would have should have been walking
Future present past: He will does walked
Double future: He will will walk
Unconditional present: He could can walk
Obsessive progressive: He is being doing walking
Refractive future perfect: He did will was have walked
Superjunctive: He might be having been about to be walking

The Tortoise stepped ever so carefully across the finish line, just a moment before the Hare would have been about to be going to hop across it himself. ‘I won!’ she said. The Hare paused a moment, then replied, ‘Yes, Ms. Tortoise, in the next decade you will have been about to be going to be used to be having been doing being the winner of this race, but tomorrow we’ll have to do it again, for it’s two out of three, ma’am.’

“Let us take a typical case. A gentleman and his wife, calling on friends, find them not at home. The gentleman decides to leave a note of regret couched in a few well-chosen words, and the first thing he knows he is involved in this:

We would have liked to have found you in.

“Reading it over, the gentleman is assailed by the suspicion that he has too many ‘haves,’ and that the whole business has somehow been put too far into the past. … He takes an envelope out of his pocket and grimly makes a list of all the possible combinations, thus getting:”

• We would have liked to have found
• We would have liked to find
• We would like to have found
• We would like to find
• We had hoped to have been able to have found

“If he has married the right kind of woman, she will hastily scratch a brief word on a calling card, shove it under the door, and drag her husband away.”

— James Thurber, “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage,” 1931

Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:

• Bates Motel
• Disco Inferno
• Up Your Assets
• Race Horse
• Crashing Bore
• English Muffin
• Leo Pity Me
• Cold Shower
• T.V. Doubletalk
• Ranikaboo
• Holy Cats
• Hadn’t Orter
• Strong Strong
• Honeybunny Boo

After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”

This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end: