In spite of twenty-five years in Southern California, [Aldous Huxley] remains an English gentleman. The scientist’s habit of examining everything from every side and of turning everything upside down and inside out is also characteristic of Aldous. I remember him leafing through a copy of Transition, reading a poem in it, looking again at the title of the magazine, reflecting for a moment, then saying, ‘Backwards it spells NO IT ISN(T) ART.’
— Igor Stravinsky, Dialogues, 1982
schoenobatist
funambulist
equilibrist
n. a tightrope walker
contrist
v. to make sad
dolorifuge
n. anything that drives away pain
dedolence
n. absence of sorrow
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON and WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON are the only U.S. presidents whose names contain the letters C-R-I-M-I-N-A-L.
psilosopher
n. a superficial philosopher
Every number greater than 8 has at least two letters in common with each of its neighbors.
piscation
n. fishing
halieutics
n. a treatise on fish or the art of fishing
Two very old stories are worth repeating for their peculiar excellence. A Scotch newspaper, reporting the danger that an express-train had run in consequence of a cow going upon the line, said, ‘As the safest way, the engineer put on full steam, dashed up against the cow, and literally cut her into calves.’ In the earlier half of this century a London paper announced that Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were shooting peasants in Ireland.
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892