— The [Chicago] Day Book, July 18, 1916
Language
Literary
For a story on library cutbacks in a certain Essex town, the Telegraph chose the headline BOOK LACK IN ONGAR.
(Apparently apocryphal, but entertaining.)
Descent
Bycocket is an obsolete word for a kind of cap or headdress. Its entry in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains this woeful note:
Through a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error, this word appears in modern dictionaries as ABACOT. In Hall’s Chron. a bicocket appears to have been misprinted abococket, which was copied by Grafton, altered by Holinshed to abococke, and finally ‘improved’ by Abraham Fleming to abacot (perhaps through an intermediate abacoc); hence it was again copied by Baker, inserted in his Glossarium by Spelman, and thence copied by Phillips, and so handed down through Bailey, Ash, Todd, etc., to 19th century dictionaries (some of which provide a picture of the ‘abacot’), and even inserted in dictionaries of English and foreign languages.
The OED defines abacot as a “variant of bycocket”.
A Curious Letter
In 1768, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new alphabet, warning that without a phonetic scheme to stabilize spelling and pronunciation, “our writing will become the same with the Chinese as to the difficulty of learning and using it.” He composed this letter as a sample of his idea:
He explains everything (and answers the imagined objections above) in this essay.
06/03/2026 UPDATE: Reader Jason Taff notes:
The word ‘I’ is pronounced as a diphthong in English, and it’s transcribed as such in that text. But the first vowel of the diphthong in the text matches the ‘schwa’ vowel in the last syllable of ‘Kensington’, whereas modern English pronounces that first sound to match the sound in the word ‘not’ (which appears later in the text).
This is precisely a remnant of what’s called the Great English Vowel Shift that separates Chaucerian English from Shakespearean English. It had started in Shakespeare’s time (1600’s), but hadn’t fully progressed to its modern version in Franklin’s time (1700’s). This text is a snapshot record of that change in progress!
(Thanks, Jason.)
Concise
Spotted on the r/linguisticshumor subreddit:
One World
Al-longs, ong-fong der lar Part-ree-e-yer,
Ler joor der glwore ait arr-ee-vay.
— Lyrics to La Marseillaise rendered in phonetic French for British soldiers in World War I, from Frank Scudamore’s “Parley Voo”!!, 1915 (via Tony Augarde’s Wordplay, 2011)
Help Wanted
In an 1893 textbook, criminologist Hans Gross tells how investigators interpreted this ideograph, which had appeared on the wall of a remote Austrian chapel:
The bird, drawn with a single stroke, represents a parrot, alluding to the great loquacity of the owner of the mark, who was famous housebreaker. The second sign is a church, the third a key. Below, we see three round objects on a line; this, according to the calendar of the Styrian peasantry, is the emblem of St. Stephen, i.e., three stones placed on the ground, alluding to the martyrdom of the Saint by stoning. They here indicate the date, viz., St. Stephen’s Day, 26th December. By the side is an infant in swaddling clothes, this indicates the birth of the Saviour, the date being 25th December. The whole thus means: the owner of the parrot sign intends to break into a church on 26th December. He desires accomplices, and will accordingly be in the neighbourhood of the sign (a lonely chapel in a wood) on 25th December to meet whoever turns up.
“The police, knowing the importance of the signs, took a copy to the Magistrate, a priest helped to interpret the liturgical emblems, and on Christmas day four dangerous criminals were captured near the chapel in the wood.”
Mouthful
In 1641, a syndicate of Puritan clergymen published a pamphlet upholding the Presbyterian theory of the ministry.
They published it under the memorable pseudonym Smectymnuus, an acronym derived from the initials of the five authors: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstowe.
The Oxford English Dictionary still recognizes the wonderful word Smectymnuan, meaning any of these authors or one who accepted their views.
The Social Whirl
In a 1962 nightmare, writer Thomas Meehan imagined having to introduce Uta Hagen to Yma Sumac, Ava Gardner, Abba Eban, Oona O’Neill, Ugo Betti, Ona Munson, Ida Lupino, the Aga Khan, Ira Wolfert, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Eva Gabor at a Greenwich Village cocktail party:
“Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva.”
Then Polish concert pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski turns up. “‘Come in, Mieczyslaw!’ I cry, with tears in my eyes. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life!'”
Dark Matter
Merriam-Webster points out something I’d never noticed: In many languages, the word for night consists of the word for eight preceded by the letter N:
English: N + eight = Night
German: N + acht = Nacht
French: N + huit = Nuit
Spanish: N + ocho = Noche
Italian: N + otto = Notte
Portuguese: N + oito = Noite
It’s a coincidence. Romance languages derive their words for eight and night from the Latin octo and noctem, and the Germanic languages get them from the Old High German ahto and the Germanic naht. In each case the similarity of the sounds is just happenstance.
(Thanks, Sharon.)