N, n: From the Canaanite
nun "fish." Between the waterfall,
mem, and the fish,
nun, leaping up like a lightning-bolt, comes the alphabet's midpoint, dividing the most common letters, placed within easy reach, from the least common, shoved against the back wall. A typical dictionary devotes a hundred pages on
Aardvark to
azygous, whereas we can get all the way from
xanthate to
Zyrian in less than ten.
nonce word: A word coined for a single occasion and never used again. One might reasonably ask if such a thing can even exist. For example, if someone made up the word
gulk to mean "I cannot believe what I am hearing," could this properly be considered a word at all if it were never repeated? And once spoken, if it were printed in a dictionary somewhere as an example of a nonce word, wouldn't it cease to be one?
Coming November 30th, the RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST
Published on November 14, 2011 03:27