wittol
n. a man who knows of and tolerates his wife’s infidelity
Search Results for: in a word
“Words Without Song”
In 1903, Gilbert Woglom of New York composed “The Tramp’s Gratitude,” a musical composition in which the names of the notes, taken successively, spell out a poem:
A bad-faced, faded, aged cad
Begged a feed, a bed, bedad.
Bedded, fed, a café added,
Bed, bag, baggage, egad, cad cabbaged.
The longest English word that can be spelled with musical note names alone is CABBAGE-FACED.
Charged Words
Electrical terms that Benjamin Franklin appears to have been the first to use, at least in print in English:
- armature
- battery
- brush
- charged
- charging
- condense
- conductor
- discharge
- electrical fire
- electrical shock
- electrician
- electrified
- electrify
- electrized
- Leyden bottle
- minus (negative or negatively)
- negatively
- non-conducting
- non-conductor
- non-electric
- plus (positive or positively)
- stroke (electric shock)
- uncharged
This list is from Carl Van Doren’s 1938 biography. “Though he never lost sight of what was being done in electricity during his whole lifetime, he was perfectly willing to have his contributions to it absorbed in the enlarging science. They were absorbed, and it is now difficult to trace the details of his influence.”
A Few Specific Words
abactor
n. a person who steals livestock
epyllion
n. a little epic
hecatomped
adj. measuring 100 feet square
nouveau pauvre
n. a person who has recently become poor
pogonology
n. a treatise on beards
tessaraglot
adj. written or printed in four languages
transpontine
adj. beyond a bridge
truandise
n. fraudulent begging
(Thanks, Kevin.)
Words and Numbers
Andrzej Bartz offered these “doubly true” alphametics in the May 2017 issue of Word Ways. If the letters in each equation encode digits, what mathematical facts do these expressions represent?
CCCLVI + CCCI + CCLI = CMVIII
ONE + THIRTYNINE + NINETYONE = THREE + NINE + THIRTY + EIGHTYNINE
TWO × TWO + TEN × FIVE = SIX × NINE
Last Words
On April 8, 1959, when keepers arrived at the Spectacle Reef lighthouse in Lake Huron to prepare it for a new season, they discovered a note:
To Whom It May Concern:
At 1705 hours my plane went down 400 kilometers out at 035 to 050 degrees. I was one mile northeast of here at 5000 feet when my engine went quite dead. I tried to make it in but landed in the water. At that time there were large open areas of water. I did not try to land on the ice as it did not look thick enough. Also I wanted to get as close to this light as possible.
The plane went down in about two minutes after it landed. Before it did it floated close enough to a floe for me to jump. The ice was not over two inches thick. Another large body of water separated me from the light so I waited.
Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast. The ice I was on started to move. At the very last moment one quarter of the ice ground against the ice packed around the light. My ice floe broke up fast so I ran for the light. I got ashore but was wet from falling in. My clothes froze before I could get the door open.
Once inside I used your towels and overshoes to keep from freezing.
About 2100 I got your stove lit. I hooked up the batteries and lit your warning lamp. The radio receiver worked but the transmitter was dead. I didn’t know enough about it to make it work. I have used the batteries until they are going dead. I sat up last night sending out SOS calls by blinking the main light.
Right now I am deliberating whether to stay here or cross the ice. From the chart I will have eleven miles to travel. There are large water holes, thin ice which had been broken into pieces by the wind yesterday. There is hardly any wind today. We have had two freezing nights, so I ought to make it in about four hours. I want to go now because it is nice weather.
Also I did not file a flight plan so no one will look for me another two or three days. The weather may be bad again.
I have made a mess of your building. I hope you will forgive me. I am going to take some equipment with me, binoculars, coat, hat, blankets, etc. I will turn them into the United States Coast Guard as soon as I get ashore.
Signed,
M.Sgt. William J. Wyman
USAF
The note bore no date. Wyman had departed Saginaw in a Piper Super Cruiser on Feb. 22, headed for the former Kinross Air Force Base near Sault Ste. Marie. He had never arrived. No trace of him was ever found.
(Thanks, Charles.)
Proof Without Words
In any right triangle, the angle bisector of the right angle divides the square on the hypotenuse into two congruent trapezoids.
Words and Numbers
fIVe + sIX + seVen
5 + 6 + 7 = 18
IV + IX + V = 18
These are the only three consecutive numbers whose sum equals that of the Roman numerals embedded in their names.
Last Words
In The King’s English (1997), Kingsley Amis cites an old joke that illustrates the confusing distinction between shall and will:
A swimmer in difficulties was heard to shout, ‘I will drown and nobody shall save me.’ At an inquest on the unfortunate fellow, English jurors wanted a verdict of suicide, Scottish jurors a verdict of death by misadventure, and MacTavish pressed for a rider or footnote rebuking witnesses for making no effort to rescue the victim.
Under the old rule, I shall indicated a prediction and I will denoted a promise or threat. Confusingly, in the second and third persons these meanings were reversed, so that you/she will indicated simple futurity and you/she shall denoted an intention or command. Still more confusingly, old-fashioned speakers of Scottish English reversed this whole understanding of the matter. So while the English jurors thought the swimmer was saying, “It is my intention to drown, and it is my express desire that nobody try to save me,” the Scots took him to say, “I am going to drown and it seems that nobody is going to save me.”
All this has only grown more confused with the popularity of contractions such as I’ll and you’ll, and Americans have generally dispensed with shall and use will for everything. Of the joke, Amis writes, “Nobody tells that one today.”
Overspecialized Words
Some words become famous for their implausibly specific definitions:
ucalegon: a neighbor whose house is on fire
nosarian: one who argues that there is no limit to the possible largeness of a nose
undoctor: to make unlike a doctor
Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, collects examples ranging from atpatruus (“a great-grandfather’s grandfather’s brother”) to zumbooruk (“a small cannon fired from the back of a camel”). My own favorite is groak, “to watch people silently while they’re eating, hoping they will ask you to join them.”
Alas, most of these don’t appear in the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary. Accordingly, in 1981 Jeff Grant burrowed his way into the OED in a deliberate search for obscure words. When he reached the end of A he sent his 10 favorite finds to the British magazine Logophile:
acersecomic: one whose hair was never cut
acroteriasm: the act of cutting off the extreme parts of the body, when putrefied, with a saw
alerion: an eagle without beak or feet
all-flower-water: cow’s urine, as a remedy
ambilevous: left-handed on both sides
amphisbaenous: walking equally in opposite directions
andabatarian: struggling while blindfolded
anemocracy: government by wind
artolatry: the worship of bread
autocoprophagous: eating one’s own dung
“I have been working slowly through ‘B’ and so far my favourite is definitely ‘bangstry’, defined as ‘masterful violence’, an obsolete term that is surely overdue for a comeback.”
(From Word Ways, November 1981.)