Henry Honychurch Gorringe (1841-1885) certainly deserved a hero’s remembrance. A naval officer and captain of the USS Gettysburg, he discovered an undersea mountain and moved Cleopatra’s needle from Egypt to New York.
Instead, he’s remembered for a verse by Arthur Guiterman:
In Sparkill buried lies that man of mark
Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
Redoubtable Commander H.H. Gorringe,
Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for “orange.”
librocubicularist
n. one who reads in bed
Update: An alert reader points out that this is not a proper English word — it was proposed by Christopher Morley in his Haunted Bookshop (1919):
‘All right,’ said the bookseller amiably. ‘Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?’
Titania looked a little scandalized.
‘It’s all right, my dear,’ said Helen. ‘He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I’ve been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he’s immensely proud of it.’
In any case, etymologically librocubicularist should mean merely “someone who does something with a book in a bedroom.” Apologies for the error, and thanks to Eadwine for pointing it out.
abligurition
n. excessive spending on food and drink
Isaac Asimov proposed this mnemonic for a famous constant:
How I want a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Count the letters in each word and you’ll get 3.14159265358979.
misodoctakleidist
n. one who hates practicing the piano
Rearrange the letters in ALEC GUINNESS and you get GENUINE CLASS.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES alternates vowels and consonants.
eyeservice
n. work done only while the boss is looking
James Joyce thought cuspidor the most beautiful word in the English language. Arnold Bennett chose pavement. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cellar door had an especially beautiful sound.
These may seem odd choices, because it’s hard to separate sound from sense. “The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word,” wrote Max Beerbohm, “is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.”
Beerbohm once pressed this point with his friend Robert Hichens (related in David Cecil’s 1964 biography Max):
One day [Beerbohm] said to Hichens, ‘Do you think, Crotchet, that a word can be beautiful, just one word?’
‘Yes,’ Hichens said, ‘I can think of several words that seem to me beautiful.’
‘Ah?’
A pause.
‘Then tell me, do you think the word ermine is a beautiful word?’
‘Yes,’ Hichens said, ‘I like the sound of it very much.’
‘Ah?’
Another pause.
‘And do you think vermin is a beautiful word?’
One meets with curious things in the old church registers of England. The subjoined, in the Record Office of Winchester Cathedral, dated 1182, is certainly unique. It is a bill for work done: —
To soldering and repairing St. Joseph, 0 l. 8 d.
To cleaning and ornamenting the Holy Ghost, 0 l. 6 d.
To repairing the Virgin Mary and cleaning the child, 4 l. 8 d.
To screwing a nose on the Devil, and putting in the hair on his head, and placing a new joint in his tail, 5 l. 6 d.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical (1882)