Welcome to the website woven for wordaholics, logolepts, and verbivores. Carnivores eat meat; herbivores eat plants and vegetables; verbivores devour words. If you are heels over head (as well as head over heels) in love with words, tarry here a while to graze or, perhaps, feast on the English language. Ours is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway and your nose can run and your feet can smell.

These days we San Diegans frequently read and hear the verb harass and the noun harassment. Whether to place the stress on the first syllable or the second of each of these words is one of the hottest debates among those who care about pronunciation. In a nutshell, the stress traditionally falls on the first syllable, HAR-is, HAR-is-ment; but, over time, the stress has moved to the second syllable, huh-RASS, huh-RASS-ment. Either sounding is correct.

That brings us to the adjective mayoral. Be sure to stress the first syllable, MAY-ur-ul. There is no oral in mayoral, nor in electoral, pastoral and pectoral.

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The Car Guys on Public Radio often joke about the fictional law firm Dewey, Cheatam and Howe. Ex Mayor Bob Filner is represented by the real-life legal firm of Payne & Fears. The names of the principal partners of that group reflect the pain and fears we San Diegans have suffered as we watched this Greek drama play itself out — the calamitous fall from a lofty position of a man ensnarled by a tragic flaw in his character.

Language unremittingly names itself, and sure enough, there’s a label for names such as Payne & Fears. An auspicious name, such as Harry Truman, Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Marvell, is called an euonym (Greek: “good name”). An inauspicious name, such as Payne, Fears, Hertz and Hogg, is a dysonym or cacanym (Greek “bad name”).

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One of the most popular features in the Sunday U-T is Steve Breen’s weekly cartoon caption contest. Steve draws a sprightly cartoon and invites readers to provide an appropriately witty caption. Recently, Steve presented his caricature of then-Mayor Bob Filner staring salaciously at a woman and asked readers to come up with a title for “The Bob Filner Biopic.”

I’m not a political person, but the challenge of the wordplay stirred my blood. One of my submissions, “The Groper Is Wild,” was chosen as a finalist from the more than 1,000 entries received. The other two titles I sent in were “The Old Gray Mayor, He Is What He Used to Be” and “I’m Too Sexed Up for My Job!”

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The largest category of last names began as descriptions of the work that people did. Two major mayoral candidates fit that category. Kevin Faulconer’s last name means “keeper and trainer of falcons,” while Nathan Fletcher’s last name means “arrow smith or arrow seller.”

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On September 1, after four failed attempts, 64-year-old Diana Nyad completed the 103-mile swim from Cuba to Key West, without the aid of a shark cage. For what it’s worth linguistically, a naiad is a water nymph, and naiad is an anagram of Diana.

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Recently, TripAdvisor selected America’s Finest City as the repository of America’s Finest Pizza. Las Vegas came out second and New York fourth, and Chicago didn’t make the top 10. I remember when pizza was called pizza pie, as Dean Martin crooned, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.” But pizza pie is a redundancy, because pizza in Italian means “pie.”

This category of bilingual repetition includes epileptic seizure (“seizure seizure”), the hoi polloi (“the the people”), beautiful calligraphy (“beautiful beautiful writing”), correct orthography (“correct correct writing”), head honcho, (“head head”), rice paddy (“rice rice”), shrimp scampi (“shrimp shrimp”), luke warm (“warm warm”), the Gobi or Sahara Desert (“the Desert Desert”) and The La Brea Tar Pits (“The The Tar Pits Tar Pits”).

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Yesterday, we experienced our first Friday the 13th of 2013. If you’re a trifle queasy about years, days and hotel floors that include the number 13, you are displaying triskaidekaphobia, cobbled together from the Greek word parts tris, “three” + kai, “and” + deka, “ten” + phobia, “fear.”

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Americans have recently been advised to use duct tape to provide protection against a terror attack. You may be surprised to find that the original name of the cloth-backed, waterproof adhesive product was duck tape, so called because it repels water.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com