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One, Two, Three …

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Magpie_hopscotch.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

It’s ironic that hopscotch has come to be known as a little girl’s game, because it couldn’t have a more masculine pedigree. The first hopscotch courts were used in military training exercises in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire. Footsoldiers wearing field packs and full body armor ran through courts 100 feet long, much as football players run through truck tires today.

Imitating the soldiers, Roman children drew their own smaller courts and added a scoring system, which has been preserved remarkably well for more than a thousand years as the game has spread to France (where it’s called “Marelles”), Germany (“Templehupfen”), the Netherlands (“Hinkelbaan”), India (“Ekaria Dukaria”), and even Vietnam (“Pico”) and Argentina (“Rayuela”).

Today’s children still draw their hopscotch courts with the word “London” at the top, without knowing that they’re representing the Great North Road, a 400-mile Roman road from Glasgow to London that was frequently used by the Roman military.

| History

Speak Up, Please

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jean_Paul_Laurens_Le_Pape_Formose_et_Etienne_VII_1870.jpg

The appropriate word here is “Bleeaagh.” In 897, Pope Stephen VI dug up the decomposing body of his predecessor and put it on trial for violating church law. Formosus, who had been dead for nine months, was found guilty and buried again. Rome turned against Stephen, who was eventually strangled in prison. It’s known as the cadaver synod or, in Latin, the “synodus horrenda.”

| Death · Oddities · Religion

Yikes

Unusual phobias:

  • albuminurophobia: fear of kidney disease
  • alliumphobia: fear of garlic
  • allodoxaphobia: fear of opinions
  • ancraophobia: fear of wind
  • anuptaphobia: fear of staying single
  • arachibutyrophobia: fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
  • atomosophobia: fear of atomic explosions
  • aulophobia: fear of flutes
  • aurophobia: fear of gold
  • barophobia: fear of gravity
  • caligynephobia: fear of beautiful women
  • cherophobia: fear of gaiety
  • deipnophobia: fear of dining or dinner conversations
  • euphobia: fear of hearing good news
  • geniophobia: fear of chins
  • genuphobia: fear of knees
  • hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: fear of long words
  • linonophobia: fear of string
  • lutraphobia: fear of otters
  • mottephobia: fear of moths
  • porphyrophobia: fear of the color purple
  • pteronophobia: fear of being tickled by feathers
  • scriptophobia: fear of writing in public
  • spheksophobia: fear of wasps
  • zemmiphobia: fear of the great mole rat

Politicophobia is defined as “abnormal” dislike of politicians.

| Trivia

Screaming at the Ants

Euphemisms for vomiting:

  • Un-eating
  • Number three
  • Vector-spewing
  • Launching lunch
  • Jackson Pollock
  • Eating backwards
  • Parking the tiger
  • Making a crustless pizza
  • Bringing it up for a vote
  • Cooking up a pavement pizza
  • Driving the Buick to Europe
  • Alan’s psychedelic breakfast
  • Yawning for the hearing impaired
  • Yodelling to the porcelain megaphone
  • Talking to God on the big white telephone
  • Paying homage to the Irishman Huey O’Rourke
  • Calling Huey (or Ralph) on the commode-a-phone

Also: horking, yakking, yarfing, yorxing. “Grasp the subject,” wrote Cato, “the words will follow.”

| Language

Deathbed Awkwardness

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/picamer/paWestern.html

When you’re busy dying, it can be hard to think of a pithy exit line. Actual last words:

  • Pancho Villa: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
  • Roman emperor Gaius Caligula: “I am still alive!”
  • Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian: “I am about to — or I am going to — die: either expression is correct.”
  • Henrik Ibsen, after his housekeeper told a guest he was feeling better: “On the contrary!”
  • Karl Marx, to his housekeeper, who had just asked whether he had any last words: “Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
  • British surgeon Joseph Henry Green, after checking his own pulse: “Stopped.”
  • Union general John Sedgwick, sizing up enemy sharpshooters: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist–“

On her way to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette stepped on the executioner’s toe. Her last words were “Pardonez-moi, monsieur.”

| Death

Classifiable?

Autological words describe themselves:

  • pentasyllabic
  • seventeen-lettered
  • descriptive
  • uninformative
  • English
  • pronounceable
  • confusionful
  • wee

Heterological words don’t:

  • abbreviated
  • adverb
  • purple
  • carcinogenic
  • plural
  • phonetic
  • misspelled

So is heterological a heterological word?

| Language

Kadigans

A kadigan is a placeholder for an unspecified word. You know: blivet, deelie-bob, device, dingus, doodad, doohickey, doofunny, doover, fnord, gadget, geemie, gizmo, hoochamajigger, kerjigger, oojah, oojamaflip, thingamajig, thingamabob, thingamadoodle, thingo, thingum, thingummy, thingy, thing-thing, whatchamacallit, whatchamajigger, whatsit, whosey, whoseywhatsit, whosis, widget, whatsitsname.

These are common words that do useful work, but they have no formal part of speech, falling somewhere between nouns and pronouns. “Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly,” wrote William Penn, “for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.”

| Language

Palindromes

Palindromes:

  • Campus motto: Bottoms up, Mac!
  • Do geese see God?
  • Dennis sinned.
  • Name now one man’s sensuousness. Name now one man.
  • Never odd or even.
  • Plan no damn Madonna LP!
  • Rotary gyrator
  • Roy, am I mayor?
  • Sex at noon taxes.
  • Ten animals I slam in a net.
  • Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?
  • Tarzan raised a Desi Arnaz rat.
  • Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.
  • Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.
  • Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
  • Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
  • Rettebs, I flahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better. (Stephen Fry)
  • Rats drown in WordStar.
  • “Sit on a potato pan, Otis!”
  • “Do nine men interpret?” “Nine men,” I nod.
  • A slut nixes sex in Tulsa.

And “Gnu dung, sides reversed, is gnu dung.”

| Language