quidam
n. an unknown person
oppidan
n. an inhabitant of a town
obrute
v. to overwhelm, bury; to cover over
recumbentibus
n. a knockdown blow
The “sitting man” is numbered among the victims of Vesuvius in 79 CE.
He died crouching in a corner of his house, holding a scarf over his mouth.
In 2007 I posted this cryptic verse by William Whewell:
U 0 a 0 but I 0 U,
O 0 no 0 but O 0 me;
O let not my 0 a 0 go,
But give 0 0 I 0 U so.
You sigh for a cipher but I sigh for you,
O sigh for no cipher, but O sigh for me;
O let not my sigh for a cipher go,
But give sigh for sigh, for I sigh for you so.
In An Almanac of Words at Play (1975), Willard R. Espy offered this addition. What does it say?
Oy OO thO he O
2 On an OO. OO bO
An OO but he never thO
He’d O the OO dealer O
For the OO OO bO.
Say, has OO’s OO brO
OO O that OO sO?
OO’s OO’s good for nO.
J.A. Lindon composed this remarkable pair of monosyllabic poems in 1969. The two read the same, but each has its own rhyme scheme, and each is a distinct acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out the title.
Cats, Cats, Cats, Cats!
Cats come with mews,
All have sharp claws,
They air their views.
Stray soon from laws,
Climb wall. Each tom
And each mog — grand
Thieves — munch meal from
Scamp’s lunch. Scamp planned …
Chain off, he might
Aim at a rout,
Touch mogs and bite
Such prime bits out!
Chance came. Grey dawn.
At once left mat.
The deuce! On lawn -
Scamp loose — no cat!
Chase ’em, Scamp, Go On!
Cats come with mews, all
Have sharp claws, they
Air their views, stray
Soon from laws, climb wall.
Each tom and
Each mog — grand thieves — munch
Meal from Scamp’s lunch.
Scamp planned …
Chain off, he might aim
At a rout, touch
Mogs and bite such
Prime bits out. Chance came.
Grey dawn. At
Once left mat. The deuce!
On lawn — Scamp loose -
No cat!
(J.A. Lindon and Walter Shedlofsky, “Convertible Acrostics,” Word Ways 2:3 [August 1969], 159-161.)
Poet Alastair Reid arranged unusual words into “garlands,” rings that end where they began:
What is a Tingle-Airey?
A tingle-airey is a hand organ, usually played on the street by the turning of a handle, and often decorated with mother-of-pearl or piddock shells.
What are Piddocks?
Piddocks are little mollusks which bore holes in rocks and wood, or in the breastsummers of buildings.
What is a Breastsummer?
A breastsummer is a great beam supporting the weight of a wall, and sometimes of a gazebo above.
What is a Gazebo?
A gazebo is a round balcony with large windows looking out on a view, often of ornamental gardens and cotoneasters.
What is a Cotoneaster?
A cotoneaster is a kind of flowering shrub, a favorite of mumruffins.
What is a Mumruffin?
A mumruffin is a long-tailed tit which often visits bird tables in winter for its share of pobbies.
What are Pobbies?
Pobbies are small pieces of bread thrumbled up with milk and fed to birds and baby animals.
What is Thrumbled?
Thrumbled is squashed together. Ants thrumble round a piece of bread, and crowds in streets thrumble round gongoozlers.
What is a Gongoozler?
A gongoozler is an idle person who is always stopping in the street and staring at a curious object like a tingle-airey.
Once you’ve traversed the list twice or thrice, he says, “you will be able to use them whenever you wish.”
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.
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.)
I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro? No, he’s just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.
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.)
A brainteaser from the British intelligence agency GCHQ:
Explain the following: falkun, home de guerra, kick, lavoro, moed, mosca, raccordement, schafer, stobhach, tre, zevk.
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.”
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.