Since January 1926, the award-winning magazine published by the San Diego Zoological Society has been titled ZOONOOZ. It’s a bedazzling, beguiling and bewitching name because it’s a palindrome, reading the same forward and backward. It also reads the same right side up and upside down. Topsy-turvy words like ZOONOOZ that retain their appearance turvy […]
Believe it or not, March 6 annually marks National Dentists Day. Dentists might not be the most popular people, but we all need them to help us preserve sound oral health. My dentists will tell you that getting me to sit still in a dentist’s chair is like pulling teeth. As a born coward, […]
A number of readers of this wordstruck column remember, from back in those school days, school days, dear old golden rule days, the challenges and joys of diagramming sentences. Those solid and dotted horizontal and diagonal lines, with words, phrases and clauses written above each one, acted as a pre-GPS map to help you navigate […]
Last week, more than one-third of House Democrats boycotted the inauguration of Donald Trump as our 45th president. Such a collective action raises (not begs!) the question what is the origin of the word boycott? Turns out that it’s an eponym (Greek “upon a name”), a lower-cased word that started life as a person’s […]
Dear Richard Lederer: For many years, my grandmother resided in a nursing home. When she developed a serious fever, an ambulance was called. One of the crew asked our family, “Does she want to go laying down or sitting up?” We suggested, “Why don’t you ask Grandma?” The ambulance crewman looked at us with […]
This coming Friday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as America’s 45th president. The story behind the word inaugurate is an intriguing one. It literally means “to take omens from the flight of birds.” In ancient Rome, augurs would predict the outcome of an enterprise by the way the birds were flying. These soothsayer-magicians would tell […]
Here’s a little finger exercise. Remember that I’m the teacher, so you must try to do what I ask. Form a circle with the fingers on your left hand by touching the tip of your index finger to the tip of your thumb. Now poke your head through that circle. If you unsuccessfully tried to […]
Tomorrow, one number on the celestial odometer will roll over, and we’ll all be inhabiting the year 2017. So let’s take some time to talk about time and the origins of the names of our 12 months. In his play Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare speaks of people who “run before the clock,” as if […]
A mondegreen is a word or words formed from a misinterpretation of what the word or words actually are, such as “take it for granite,” for “take it for granted” and “for all intensive purposes” for “for all intents and purposes.” Children are innocently brilliant at concocting original interpretations of the boundaries that separate words. […]
Which speaker is a cannibal? a. Let’s eat, Grandma. b. Let’s eat Grandma. The answer is that the speaker in the second sentence is the cannibal because, without the comma, Grandma becomes the object of the verb eat. To discover how a slight difference in wording and punctuation can make a vast difference in meaning, […]