The first reported instance of a duel over the proper use of semicolons took place on February 11, 1837, in Paris, as The Spectator reports,

“between two well-known jurisconsults of the Law School, on account of a passage of the Pandects.1 The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm. His adversary maintained that it should be a colon; and quoted in support of his opinion the text of Trebonius.”2

There is not, unfortunately, a second reported instance of a duel over the proper use of semicolons, so we shall have to content ourselves with the one that we have. By the time of the duel, the semicolon had been in existence for 341 years.3 It was forged in Venice by the mad printer Aldus Manutius who, like a punctuation Frankenstein meddling with forces beyond his comprehension, grafted a comma onto the bottom of a colon and set it loose to cause what trouble it may; though in its first foray, an essay in Latin about climbing Mount Etna by Pietro Bembo, it appears to have caused very little trouble at all.

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Aldus Manutius the Younger (cute name for a grandson, ngl) explains the mark in his own Interpungendi Ratio as creating a pause between that of a comma and a colon, for cases when…

“...the semi-circle [meaning, the comma] on its own is not sufficient, and that mark which is transcribed with a double point thus : [i.e., the colon] slows up the sentence too much.”

But the trouble (as is so often the case with this sort of thing) arrived when people started trying to impose order by introducing rules. In Fowler’s Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler attempts to cage the beast with his own mesmerizingly inscrutable incantation:

“The use of semicolons to separate parallel expressions that would normally be separated by commas is not in itself illegitimate; but it must not be done when the expressions so separated form a group that is itself separated by nothing more than a comma, if that, from another part of the sentence. To do this is to make the less include the greater, which is absurd.”

I’ve spent enough time with that irritatingly dense paragraph to be able to tell you that Fowler has a point, even if he’s being a prick about it. Up until the 19th century, semicolons mostly told you how long to pause (indicating prosody); but by the time Fowler lurched onto the scene, grammarians were starting to feel like this wasn’t enough to justify a full job description, and that punctuation marks like the semicolon ought to get off their lazy butts and start playing a role in the hierarchy of the sentence itself (indicating syntax).4

You can feel this tension in the increasingly alarmed pronouncements of Victorian grammarians, like Goold Brown, whose 1851 The Grammar of English Grammars was, in part, an attempt to consolidate two centuries of grammatical thought into a single overarching theory – though it reads more like a manic, 1,100-page diss track, calling out all the player-hating grammarians of the era who “’bout to feel the wrath of a menace.”5 When Brown bemoans the loss of the colon to the faddish mania for semicolons (“its place being usurped, sometimes by the semicolon, and sometimes by the period”), he makes his case strictly on the grounds of its role as a pause in the flow of thought:

“But who cannot perceive that without the colon, the semicolon becomes an absurdity? It can no longer be a semicolon, unless the half can remain when the whole is taken away!”6

But in his chapter on the semicolon, Brown has some strong notions about when the mark is and isn’t appropriate to a sentence’s structure, which mostly have to do with how “complex” the clause is that requires it. You can see a more rigid version of this same idea in Fowler (it would be “absurd”! to put a semicolon in a clause that is itself hanging on a comma), and nowadays, the Semicolon Police can arrest you for having the temerity to deviate from one of the two strictly defined uses allowed by The Chicago Manual of Style:

“Semicolons—when not separating items in a syntactically complex series—should separate independent clauses.”

It’s this dual nature of the semicolon – on the one hand, a subtle tool of the poet to create suspense or intrigue with a meaningful pause; and on the other, a finicky weapon of the pedant to impose order according to a rigid hierarchy – that has engendered such strong passions amongst its fans and detractors over the years.7 It’s what causes Edward Abbey to call them the “most obscene of all punctuation marks,”8 and it’s why Donald Barthelme strives to avoid them “as much as possible”:

“Let me be plain: the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly. I pinch them out of my prose.”

And it leads to what is probably the most famous pronouncement about the semicolon: Kurt Vonnegut’s insistence, in A Man Without a Country, that they should be jettisoned entirely:

“First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”9

Defenders of the semicolon tend to be less quotable. What they like is the vagueness it affords, and the opportunity for digressions upon digressions; a sudden catch of the breath that might lead to a quickening of the pace; or else a whole new train of thought: an aside; an unexpected conclusion. Ursula K. Le Guin (as usual) cuts to the heart of the matter, and she does so in a way that would make H.W. Fowler pull the covers back over his head and call in sick for the day:

“I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now.’”10

The best semicolons live on the crossroads between rhythm and meaning. T.S. Eliot uses them prolifically in The Dry Salvages, asking the reader to wonder, “Why did he pause there?” as in the poem’s famous opening:

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god”

And F. Scott Fitzgerald has an absolute killer of a semicolon in his story May Day (which the writer Jonathan Gibbs discusses extensively here):

“She was a little tired; she wanted to get married.”

But if you want a semicolon that will really take your breath away, you won’t do much better than this total scorcher from (the normally, to say the very least, rather abstruse) Wittgenstein,11 in Philosophical Investigations:

Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit.

The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.

None of the above examples would be a poster-boy in The Chicago Manual of Style’s §6.60 “Use of the Semicolon,” but neither can they be seen solely as rhythmic markers (as the 18th century Bibliotecha Technologica has it, “The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four”). It’s possible that (of all people) punctuation’s final boss, Gertrude Stein, has found the proper middle ground here when she claims (in On Punctuation) that semicolons – which bring the comma and the colon and the period into their very essence – are really rather exciting when they’re pretending to be periods, but merely “servile” when they’re doing the work of commas.

There are two different ways of thinking about colons and semicolons you can think of them as commas and as such they are purely servile or you can think of them as periods and then using them can make you feel adventurous I can see that one might feel about them as periods but I myself never have, I began unfortunately to feel them as a comma and commas are servile they have no life of their own they are dependent upon use and convenience and they are put there just for practical purposes.

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To say that a juggins is a gordelpus is as uncontroversial as pointing out that a guffoon is cakey like a nocky boy, but finding a way to say either of these things without making people think you’re having a stroke can be a bit of a sticky wicket. It might be helpful to mention that the Oxford English Dictionary thinks juggins (meaning “simpleton”) may be “a fantastically perverted derivative of mug,” or that your local gordelpus takes his name from a habit of exclaiming “gawd ’elp us” when at a loss (which is quite often). Guffoon is from the Italian goffo, meaning “awkward;” cakey, like the later crumpet, is largely affectionate; and nocky boy is a bit of a mystery though it may have something to do with the fact that nock (meaning “cleft”) was at one point another term for the buttocks.

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Of course if you are faced with a particularly spooney sort of clumperton, as Robert “the Devil” Duke of Normandy was in Polydore Vergil’s English History (“fallinge into … altercation with a stronge stubberne clomperton, he was shrowdlie beaten of him”), you may require some more expressive vocabulary to convey your displeasure, such as slammock (best applied to a slovenly Mrs. Juggins, but suitable for a male oaf), or the immensely satisfying jobbernowl. The nowl in jobbernowl means “head” — we see this in groutnoll (porridge-head) as well — and the jobber comes via a reference to the biblical Job, who some would argue had suffered enough already without becoming a byword for a looby old muggins, but whose propensity for getting absolutely ethered by his wife (“Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die”) gave rise to the Middle French joubard, meaning “dumbass.”

In the event that you encounter your gubbins, blathering like a bubbly-jock at a muffin-worry (old ladies’ tea party), you may prefer to approach the issue with some more delicacy (lest you offend the old slammocks who invited you), in which case I recommend whispering conspiratorially to whatever gigglemug happens to be closest that Mr. Wiggins (“any mannerist of small brains and showy feather,” according to Sportsman’s Slang: A New Dictionary of Terms Used in the Affairs of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase and the Cock-pit) appears to be a bit of a wooden spoon. A giant wooden spoon was an award presented to the student coming in last in mathematics at Cambridge University (“This luckless wight … is annually the universal butt and laughing-stock of the whole senate-house,” according to a January 1795 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine), so your clever barb will likely hit its mark unless the gollumpus is too much of a lobcock to get the hint.

On the question of what to say to your bufflehead upon encountering his giffle gaffle (nonsense), it’s important to remember that you are the Juggins’s Boy (the “sharp and impudent son of a stupid and easily ridiculed father,” according to Passing English of the Victorian era : a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase, by James Redding Ware) in this situation. If the muffish (soft, like a fur muff) doddypoll (from “dote,” as in “dotard” and “poll” meaning “head”) won’t shut his potatoe trap and give his tongue a holiday, it’s your role as a flymy (knowing) whipster (smartass) to let the half-foolish hairpin know that he’s either been guanoing the mind (reading French novels) or else he was rocked in the kitchen like a noddy Fudge. (“Fudge,” still current in a phrase like “fudge the results,” is, hilariously, a reference to an actual person, one Captain Fudge, “who always brought home his owners a good cargo of lies,” according to Disraeli.)

By this point, it should palpitate with actuality that the nawpost (someone inclined to gnaw a post) is a dying duck in a thunderstorm who’d make a stuffed bird laugh, and you can give the gazob the chuck like the dossy, dimber-damber dizzy (“Disraeli-like intellect”) you are.

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You know that thing where you and six of your best friends are trying to escape from a pagan emperor and you fall asleep in a cave and the emperor walls you in and you all wake up 208 years later during the reign of Theodosius II? Well, that’s why they used to call dormice seven-sleepers in the British Isles. I should say that dormouse already means “sleep-mouse” (or possibly just “sleeper” – the -mouse bit may have arisen from a misinterpretation of an earlier dormous, meaning “tending to be dormant”), so it’s not quite such a long walk to seven-sleepers as you might think. The early Christian story of the Seven Sleepers (who woke up in their cave, helped the new emperor settle some thorny doctrinal questions related to the resurrection of the dead, and promptly snuffed it1) would have been familiar enough to justify the reference, as it was included in a hugely popular collection of hagiographies called The Golden Legend.2

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But there are only so many whimsical stories of sleepy saints to go around, which meant that some unfortunate animals got the short end of the proverbial3 naming stick. Arse-feet did absolutely nothing to deserve their ignominious designation except insofar as their legs are placed towards the rear of their body – something they surely can’t help. The naturalist John Latham went some way towards correcting this injustice by giving the genus a fancy Latin name, podiceps, in 1787, but even this was something of a cruel joke, as podiceps is Latin for arse-feet. I think we should all feel much better about ourselves now that we mostly call these noble birds the great crested grebe, which is a genuinely awesome name that refers to their absolutely boffo crests not once but twice – grebe probably comes from a French word meaning “crest” – which suggests that we may have overcompensated a bit. That said, imagine having a truly great crest as one of your defining features but everyone decides to call you arse-foot for 200 years.

The dumbledore has had a much better go of things: They’ve mostly been called bumblebees since the 16th century (“I bomme, as a bombyll bee dothe or any flye,” says John Palsgrave, somewhat helpfully, in his 1530 French grammar) and I think even bumblebees would admit to being a bee that bumbles, just as they’d likely have copped to being a dore (bee) that dumbles (bumbles) in 1787 when dumbledore first appeared. Before Palsgrave, they were humblebees (not because of any particular meekness of character but because of the constant humming), and they’ve also been called dumbledranes4 (or dumble-drones), which does feel unnecessarily rude. In the 1800s, dumbledore was also used to refer to a scarab beetle called the cockchafer, about which the less said the better.

We do, however, have a rather daunting amount to say about the cheese-log. I’ll put it as concisely as possible: Now mainly known as woodlice or pill bugs, cheese-logs were called cheese-logs (in Berkshire mostly) for two possible reasons, only one of which has to do with cheese. The name may have been an alteration of chestlock, due to their insistence on rolling up their little chests, a theory that’s supported by the fact that they were also sometimes called lockchests, and significantly complicated by the fact that lockchest may actually be an unrelated variant of “locust.” The cheese theory is that cheese-log is a version of “cheeselip,” which is a coagulant used in cheese-making and a reason (if this theory is true) to avoid any Berkshire cheeses until we know exactly what coagulants they’re using down there. While we wait for someone to sort this mess out, I suggest you refer to any passing woodlouse as ​​Chizzle-Bob – a version of the same name that’s less likely to make him think of cheese, which may be a sore subject.5

In the course of your visit with Chizzle-Bob, you may encounter his friend and colleague, Lady Cow, or if you’re feeling formal, God’s Cow. The God’s cow (or godyscow6) was so-called for the same reason it’s known as the ladycow or (depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on) either the ladybug or the ladybird, which is (probably) not the reason you think. The most common variety of ladybug has seven spots on her back, and if any Medieval peasants are reading this, they’re likely bursting their jerkins right now because it’s all so blindingly obvious: The seven spots were clearly put there by God to remind us of the seven pains7 of the Virgin Mary. To modern readers who may be skeptical that God is talking to us with bugs, I’d ask you to account for the striking coincidence that the ladycow wears a bright red shirt, just like her namesake. At any rate, farmers were so grateful to ladybugs for eating up all the aphids (ladybugs are almost worryingly carnivorous) that they tended to see them as divine gifts, which is how we get – in addition to ladycow, cowlady, and godyscow – Little Cow of God, God Almighty’s Cow, and Virgin Mary’s Golden Hen, which is laying things on a bit thick.

I can almost feel the Medieval peasant contingent splitting their kirtles to point out that there is also a Devil’s Cow (the rove beetle, sometimes also called The Devil’s Coach Horse), but I’m absolutely sick to the teeth with bugs, so I’ll end (briefly) with a few more animals. You’ll get further with a raccoon by calling her wash-bear than the very recent trash-panda, and most porcupines will answer to quill-pig, which is what “porc-u-pine” means anyway. The cheetah used to be a leopard, while the leopard was just a pard (which means, confusingly, “panther”), but it’s best not to bring it up if you see either animal – leo-pard (for cheetah) comes from a scurrilous rumor8 that cheetahs were the result of an affair between a promiscuous lioness and a pard. A similarly slanderous rumor9 gets us to camelopard, so you’re better off just calling them giraffes like everybody else, but if you’d like to be rude to some smaller animals, you can call a platypus a duck-mole (this is not very polite, but show me the lie) or a dragonfly (sorry, one more bug) a Devil’s Darning Needle.

All that being said, if you only have time to address one animal today, I’d strongly suggest seeking out a fox and calling him Todd. It means “fox,” and nobody knows why.

Look, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, and I just haven’t quite been able to figure out the right format to tell people about it. Sometimes you can solve this sort of problem at the headline level: “I Was Today Years Old When I Learned This Positive Adjective Used to Be a Comparative.” “My Head Is Spinning About Where This One Weird Adjective Comes From.” “People Are Learning the Origin Story of This Common Word, and I, for One, Am Here for It.” But sometimes it’s better to just get it out before people lose interest. Always it’s better to do this. I’ll just do it.

According to “Words and Their Ways in English Speech,” a lovely out-of-print book from 1901 by two Harvard linguists that I’m a little bit obsessed with, the words near and next are …

“really the comparative and superlative of the adjective nigh, but they are no longer associated with nigh in our consciousness. They survive as independent words. Near has become a positive, and a new comparative has been formed from it, – nearer, which really shows a double comparative ending.”

Put more plainly, the word near was originally the comparative form of nigh – nigh-er – and next was its superlative – nigh-est. Nigh, near, next.

Near isn’t the only word that’s been promoted from comparative to positive in this way, though it’s rare to find one that hasn’t been bereaved of its other degrees (nigh and next are still around, even if they’re estranged). Utter (as in “an utter disgrace”) follows the pattern to an extent – it’s still friendly with its superlative, utmost, but has mostly lost touch with its positive, out, which nowadays can be found palling around with outer. The adverb rather is the comparative form of the mostly obsolete rathe, meaning (among other things) “early,” as in Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

Thy converse drew us with delight,

The men of rathe and riper years:

The feeble soul, a haunt of fears,

Forgot his weakness in thy sight.

And the superlative, rathest, is rarer still, though it turns up in a few odd places with the sense “most particularly.” Beatrix Potter uses it in her journals (“I would rathest of all copy the raised plaques of Wedgwood”), and Edna St. Vincent Millay gives it to the character Aelfrida in her 1927 play The King’s Henchman:

Ghent in Flanders! Great town of my many dreams! Why, lo, thou—thither to fare, That would I rathest of all things under the welkin!

“That would I rathest of all things under the welkin” is – with all due respect to the lovely town of Ghent and the great E. St. Vincent Millay – a very silly thing to say.

Nether (as in “nether regions”) started life as a comparative of *ni-, meaning “below,” a root that also rather charmingly appears in the word “nest”: The -st in “nest” is from the same word that gives us “sit,” and so “nest” quite literally means “sit down.” Nether lost touch with its own comparative in the 16th century, which is a shame, because nethermore is quite lovely, but we still just about have the superlative, nethermost, as in Joyce’s Ulysses:

The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt1 the first batch of quirefolded papers.

Probably the most famous comparative that’s lost touch with its positive is better, which along with its sister best has been adopted into the well-to-do good family. But there was once a bote to go along with better and best, and it’s not quite dead yet. You can still find it in the phrase “to boot,” as in, “He’s handsome, and he’s rich to boot!” or in Shakespeare’s self-referential Sonnet 135:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

Well, we’ve strayed a bit further afield from near than I originally intended, and I’m realizing (to boot) that I probably could have done the whole thing with just a headline and saved us all a lot of time: “Nigh Used to Go Before Near. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”

His name (for the pedantically inclined) is not Clippy. But this is not about Clippit, and it’s not about his many crimes, egregious as they may have been. I hope we can agree that Clippit has paid his debt to society by now – and to the extent that he was only a shadow of more recent technologies designed to butt in and finish our sentences for us whether we like it or not, I hope we can forgive him. No, this is not about Clippit. This is about the others.

When MS Office 97 shipped, Clippit was the default Office Assistant thanks to a surprisingly warm reception by focus groups and against the better judgement of the team responsible for the program. But if you didn’t care to take writing advice from a piece of office trash with eyeballs, there was an array of choices that might better suit your needs. As Steven Sinofsky, one of the lead engineers on the project, remembers it:

“While the paper clip, Clippit aka Clippy, would be the default, we featured a dog, a cat, a happy smiling dot reminiscent of Bob, and several more including a really boring Office logo for marketing purposes.”

I’ve left out a few of the lesser assistants (like the “really boring Office logo” and a godforsaken creature known as The Monkey King) – and some planned assistants never saw the light of day (Clippit almost ended up having “something like a little eraser friend” according to Sinofksy) – but this is a definitive ranking of the ones that, for better and worse, Clippit left behind.

8. Bosgrove

In a venerable tradition of literary butlers that includes Verne’s Passepartout, Wodehouse’s Jeeves, Ishiguro’s Mr. Stevens, and ABC’s Mr. Belvedere, Bosgrove is decidedly not. His puffed-up, elitist attitude (he was only included in the MacOS-exclusive edition of Microsoft Office 98) and his stiff, overbearing formality are uniquely ill-suited to the exquisitely aggravating task of telling me whether I’m writing a letter or not.

7. Will

Will likes to call himself the “greatest playwright in the English language,” but he sounds more like an extra in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. I would never stoop to comment on another man’s choices W/R/T dealing with male pattern baldness, so I’ll leave his grooming behavior out of this, but the ruff is just a massive bummer, as is the phrase “lifelong fascination with computers” from the man who gave us “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see.”

6. Mother Nature

As Will might say, when describing his colleague/work-wife Mother Nature:

The birds chant melody on every bush,

The snakes lie rollèd in the cheerful sun,

The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind

And make a checkered shadow on the ground

But Gaia, the Earth Mother, is not given to such embellishment. Her gifts are profound in their simplicity – who reaches for the shaky crutch of language when they have all the world’s blossoms at their fingertips? Or as Mother Nature herself might put it:

“Welcome. If you desire help on any aspect of this program, simply click me.”

As Office Assistants go, this one’s a C+.

5. The Genius

When the MS Office Assistant was first conceived, the team working on the project (including Bill Gates himself) referred to it internally as “TFC.” Sinofsky explained the acronym on a Microsoft blog in 2005:

“Another fun one for reading specs from a long time ago is that the actual feature name used in the product is never what we named it during development – the Office Assistant was famously named TFC during development. The ‘C’ stood for clown. I will let your active imagination figure out what the TF stood for.”

Despite this skeptical attitude towards their creations, you can see the care and thoughtfulness that went into bringing The Genius to life: Is this Einstein, villainously taking credit for Edison’s lightbulb and hoping no one says anything? Or is it Edison, holding his famous lightbulb while wearing an improbable Einstein wig? Nobody knows, and that’s half the fun! The other half is being interrupted by a confused old man to see if you’d like to save changes while you’re drafting an angry letter to the School Board.

4. Scribble

According to software designer Alan Cooper, “Clippy was based on a tragic misunderstanding of a really truly profound bit of research” at Stanford University, which showed that humans react to computers not as inanimate objects, but with the same emotional responses they use for other human beings:

“That’s really good research up to this point. But then the great mistake was made, which is, ‘If people react to computers as though they’re people, we have to put the faces of people on computers.’ Which in my opinion is exactly the incorrect reaction. If people are going to react to computers as though they’re humans, the one thing you don’t have to do is anthropomorphize them, because they’re already using that part of the brain.”

It is extremely funny to me that these eggheads looked at a piece of research showing that people yell at their printers when they won’t print and solved for it by creating an origami cat who would clearly rather be somewhere else but who will tell you the keyboard command for italics if you can only figure out the right way to ask him. I love you, Scribble.

3. Kairu

Kairu was exclusive to Japan, which is why his speech isn’t rendering in the image above, but this is what he says:

“Please allow me to be your on-screen helper.~~Please select me for your team.^^Splash! Please don’t forget...~~Here’s your reminder.~~Please allow me to remind you.”

The raw, almost explosive neediness of Kairu is a large part of his appeal.

2. The Dot

I like to think that when Will wrote, “a mote will turn the balance,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he was thinking of his colleague/supervisor, The Dot. Indeed if “the balance” can reasonably be seen as a measure of how to change the typeface on your résumé, then there’s no other mote in the world that better fits the description.

1. Power-Pup

Power Pup is a vision of a different future where we all rather liked the Office Assistant and wanted to keep it around. I’m not sure I fully agree with his bio, which describes him as “dynamic,” but he has a quiet dignity that is lacking in most of his compatriots, and I’m almost ready to believe – despite mountains of evidence to the contrary – that he is here to help.

Power-Pup, Clippit, and their ill-begotten brethren all grew out of a failed and now largely forgotten 1995 Microsoft initiative called Microsoft Bob, but Clippy is not Bob’s only legacy. In the same protean sludge where Clippy was forged, another sibling, more powerful than the rest, was already making its mark upon the world: Rover – the dog mascot who pre-dated his paper clip brother by two years – needed a custom font to make his speech seem friendly and playful. And that’s the story of Comic Sans.

N.B. There is a cryptic puzzle at the end of this article. If you’re new to cryptics or want to brush up, my quick cryptic crosswords crash course begins here.

In his final Gaude (a reunion for old members of New College, Oxford, where he was Warden), Reverend Spooner is said to have given an “impeccable and charming speech,” at the end of which he remarked, “and now I suppose you will expect me to say one of those things,” before taking his seat. What those things were and whether he ever actually said many or even any of them is a subject for real debate among Spoonerologists (a rather small group, as Spooner was not a wildly interesting man), but we’ve all nonetheless agreed to press on and call them spoonerisms, probably because the more technical term – metaphases – is so hopelessly dull.

The canonical examples of Spooner’s spoonerisms are all certainly apocryphal, but they’re also much more fun than the few we have that he may actually have said, so I’ll include those here (from the OED, via William Hayter’s 1977 biography of Spooner) as examples of how metaphasis works in practice.

To a delinquent undergraduate:

“You have tasted the whole worm. You have hissed my mystery lectures. You were fighting a liar in the quadrangle. You will leave by the town drain.”

Of a cat falling from a window:

“It popped on its little drawers.”

In a sermon in New College Chapel:

“Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?”

At an optician:

“Have you a signifying glass?”

“?”

“A signifying glass?”

“Er, I don’t think we stock them.”

“Oh well, it doesn’t magnify.”

This last example (of the signifying glass) doesn’t quite follow the rules of the traditional spoonerism – humorously mixing up the opening bits of two words in a phrase, as in the cat “popped on its drawers” as opposed to “dropped on its paws” – but it’s interesting in this context because it’s closer in type to the actual affliction that the real Reverend Spooner seems to have had. As the political scientist Sir Ernest Barker (a contemporary of Spooner’s at New College) described it, Spooner was “seldom guilty of metaphasis, or transposition of sounds. What he transposed was ideas.”

The British diplomat William Hayter gives a few quite amusing examples of the good Reverend engaging in this sort of conceptual metaphasis in his biography of Spooner. One such occasion involved a profoundly confusing sermon about Aristotle:

“And there is the well-known story of the sermon which referred throughout to Aristotle, in rather surprising contexts, at the end of which, after a brief pause, Spooner is supposed to have said ‘In the sermon I just preached, whenever I said Aristotle, I meant St. Paul.”

More absurd still is an anecdote about the time he managed to mistake a shaker of salt for a bottle of wine:

“At a dinner party in Oxford, [a friend] saw Dr. Spooner upset a salt-cellar and then reach for a decanter of claret. He then poured claret on the salt, drop by drop, till he had produced the little purple mound which would have been the end-product if he had spilled claret on the table-cloth and had then cast a heap of salt on the pool to absorb it.”

On another famous occasion, Spooner found the oddest possible way to invite a new colleague to dinner:

“Spooner met Stanley Casson, a rather brash young archaeologist in those days, in the Front Quadrangle, and said to him ‘Do come to dinner tonight, to meet our new Fellow, Casson.’ Casson replied ‘But Warden, I am Casson,’ to which Spooner replied ‘Never mind, come all the same.’”

I will say of Spooner, whom I uncharitably described above as “not wildly interesting,” that it is something of an injustice for him to have been immortalized in this particular way. In fact, he is known to have been quite salty about the whole business in his lifetime. Spooner was a classicist (among other things), who wanted to be known for his erudition, and in particular his edition of Tacitus’s Histories, and it must have been quite galling to instead become famous for a ludicrous verbal tick that he didn’t even really have. In a letter to his wife after a trip to South Africa, he wrote that “the Johannesburg paper had an article on my visit to Johannesburg, but of course they thought me most famous for my Spoonerisms, so I was not greatly puffed up.” And when someone was injudicious enough to raise the subject in his presence he would respond by comparing himself to Homer and Shakespeare, who also had works misattributed to them. “I err in very good company.”

Spooner had a high-pitched, lisping voice and a very distinctive appearance (“small, pink-faced and an albino, with a disproportionately large head and very short-sighted pale blue eyes,” according to Hayter), and it wouldn’t be a stretch to see the verbal games being played at his expense as a form of bullying. But the evidence is actually to the contrary: The Reverend was by all accounts very well loved by the pupils of New College where he was Warden, and his former students, who affectionately referred to him as “The Spoo,” remembered him as much for his kindness and decency as for his occasional linguistic funambulism.

One member of the college, an Egyptian, remembers The Spoo going out of his way to procure blankets and warm clothes to protect his foreign charge from the cold English winters, and there are numerous stories about Spooner counseling undergraduates who were suffering from depression and anxiety (often “caused by the crushing nature of [British philosopher and New College professor] H.W.B. Joseph’s dialectics,” as Hayter tells it), tending to a student-athlete who had injured himself in a hockey match, and generally being the sort of good egg you hope to encounter amidst the uncertainty of leaving home and trying to muddle out what sort of person you’ll be at university.

It’s more likely that the exaggerated or entirely fabricated spoonerisms that created the legend originated as affectionate jokes amongst his students, even if they ended up as caricature in Punch magazine (sample entry: “The Rev. W. A. SPOONER, Warden of New College: Many years ago, after a rough crossing, I warmed a strong fish that I might live to see the Tannel Chunnel. That fish has never waded from my heart.”). “New College … was indeed a happy ship,” says Barker, “and the happiness came from the captain.”

In one case, Spooner’s propensity for paradoxical utterances and sweet, paternal concern for his students came together in a way that would have an unlikely but profound effect on our own understanding of history:

“In 1904, an undergraduate in his last year was summoned to see Spooner:

‘Ah, began the Warden, ‘Quite so. I think when you came up to Oxford you had every intention of taking Holy Orders?

The undergraduate murmured something unintelligible and waited.

‘And I am afraid you have quite abandoned the idea?’

‘Oh rather, yes quite, Mr Warden, quite given it up.’

‘And what do you propose to do?’

‘Well, I want to be a schoolmaster, I’ve done a little at odd times and like it awfully, so I think of going in for it permanently.’

‘Oh yes, a schoolmaster, really. Well, Mr. Woolley, I have decided that you shall be an archaeologist.’

And so began the most distinguished archaeological career of the twentieth century, leading to the great excavations at Ur of the Chaldees.”

Sir Leonard Woolley, who at the time “was not quite sure what an archaeologist was,” would go on to revolutionize the discipline, resulting in monumental discoveries about ancient Mesopotamia.

In 62 continuous years at his beloved New College, Reverend Spooner shaped countless young lives, but he only managed a scarce handful of documented spoonerisms. It’s widely agreed (though, notably, disputed by his daughter) that he introduced Hymn 175 – “Conquering Kings Their Titles Take” – as “Kinquering Kongs” in 1879 (this became so famous that a 1902 issue of Punch devoted to the recent craze of Ping Pong parodied it without context: “THE new curate Rev. SPOONER, who is dans le mouvement, gives out Hymn No. 175, “Ponquering Pings their titles take”). And other reliable sources quote him as saying, respectively, “Dr. Friend’s child,” when he meant “Dr. Childe’s friend, and quoting 1 Corinthians as, “In a dark glassly,” instead of, “In a glass darkly.”

But there’s only one documented spoonerism that would satisfy purists – in that it transposes letters from different words in a phrase and creates something like a new meaning, rather than an amusing absurdity like “Kinquering Kongs.” During a lecture to undergraduates about what they might expect in the workforce, the Reverend spoke about the “weight of rages” rather than the “rate of wages,” causing one student to turn to another and say, “Well, I’ve been up for four years, and never heard the Spoo make a spoonerism before, and now he makes a damned rotten one at the last minute.” Spooner was probably better off leaving spoonerisms to the experts.

I have made a cryptic puzzle on the theme of Spooner and his -isms, which you can solve over at Big Dave’s (indispensable) Crossword Blog. The solutions are explained and annotated here.

Deep in the cavernous basements of The New York Times, where the conniving fatcats of the Wordle team spend their days plotting new ways to spin letters into gold, there is a giant horde of 5-letter words so precious and so dangerous that to lay eyes on it, even for a second, would be a death sentence. I’m assuming. But thanks to the dedication and bravery of the Wordle Resistance (at present this is just me, but I’m actively recruiting), some dozens of these highly bankable pentagrams (OED assures me that pentagram can mean “five-letter word” as well as the other thing) can be seen and enjoyed by the worthy public, away from the prying eyes of the jackbooted Wordle police.

It is through these efforts that I have discovered something quite remarkable: For every BLAND, STALE, EMPTY, or other such flavorless provender that Wordle’s black-eyed puzzle dispensers delight in spooning into our meagre bowls when it’s time to dole out our daily Wordle slop, there are a hundred five-letter miracles in the Wordle vault so bright and so dazzling that it’s a wonder they don’t burn the whole thing down. Here, for the first time, are just a few of those precious five-headed beasts. Try one, next time you sit down to a Wordle. The joyless apparatchiks of the Wordle High Command will grudgingly let them through, but I guarantee they’ll never be the answer.

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“Fubsy” is, as the young people say, having a moment. “I’m in my ‘fubsy’ era,” they are surely also saying. Taylor Swift is no doubt this very second composing a billion dollar tune about a fubsy heroine who poisons her husband and drives off in a cheeky little sports car. But what’s my evidence for this, you’re wondering? Well, not only did Stephen Fry publicly go to bat for “fubsy” in a 2009 campaign to bring back obscure words, but this little-pentagram-that-could had a glamorous cameo appearance in the 2018 bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing (which also significantly raised the profile of crawdads,1 who have never had very much to hang their tiny little hats on):

Bald and fubsy, his coat buttoned tight against a round belly, Mr. Lang Furlough testified that he owned and operated the Three Mountains Motel in Greenville.

You can see what I’m calling the “Crawdad Bump” in this chart from etymonline, which I am aware also raises some very interesting questions about what “fubsy” did in 1840 to cheese off everyone in the entire world apparently.

But and so what all does “fubsy” mean?, everyone is politely and patiently asking. Well, everyone will no doubt be satisfied to learn that fubsy is the adjectival form of the fully obsolete fubs. As in the following passage from John Crowne’s mostly forgotten Restoration comedy Sir Courtly Nice: Or, It Cannot Be:

A very honest Gentleman, but very much addicted to Marriage; ’tis he that I told you is to marry my Indian Fubs of a sister.

“Fubs” (a person who is squat and chubby) was also a pet name given by King Charles II to his mistress the Duchess of Portsmouth (real charmer, this guy) and the actual name of his yacht.

Meaning: Squat and chubby, but in an endearing kind of way like you would say to your mistress or your yacht.

Origin: Via the obsolete “fubs,” by suggestion from words like “full” and “chub.”

Wordle’s view: This is all far too interesting. Let’s just do “SLATE” again and see if anyone notices.

I like voulu because it is one of those rare words that is what it does, which is to say that it means “labored and contrived” and it is absolutely impossible to use without sounding so. The earliest occurrence of voulu as an English word is in the following passage from E. Nesbit’s Daphne in Fitzroy Street:

“After all,” Seddon was saying, as the perfect satellite began to revolve in his orbit, laden with choice hors d'oeuvres, “perhaps there's something more delicate, less voulu, in our little dinner as it is. The poignant beauty of the incomplete.”

I’ll pause here just to give you two conflicting pieces of writing advice which are that 1) If E. Nesbit invented “voulu,” then it must be a good word to use, and 2) people will think you are a real piece of work if you try to use it, and you absolutely shouldn’t. God knows I’ve tried.

Meaning: Contrived, deliberate, labored.

Origin: From the past participle of the French vouloir, meaning “wanted”

Wordle’s view: We prefer not to use words that contain the letter “u” — it’s a far too exciting vowel.

Vampires are so over. Next time a vampire tries to bite you, don’t give them the satisfaction of screaming or fainting. Just look disappointed and say, “Oh, I was hoping for a lamia.” In Greek mythology, Lamia (Λάμια) was a Libyan queen who, according to some accounts, made the mistake of being attractive to Zeus, which caused Hera to murder her children. Understandably upset about the situation, Lamia (less understandably) decided to start eating other people’s kids and drinking their blood. Zeus, feeling very bad about the whole thing, gave Lamia the power “of taking her eyes out of her head, and putting them in again,” which, far be it from me to be critical of a deity, but I don’t think this was constructive.

The extremely creepy eyes detail shows up in various accounts by Greek historians who tend to mention it without providing much more context as Plutarch does in his essay De Curiositate (“On Being a Busybody”), bringing the same enthusiasm you’d expect from a description of the proper way to store contact lenses:

But as it is, like the Lamia in the fable, who, they say, when at home sleeps in blindness with her eyes stored away in a jar, but when she goes abroad puts in her eyes and can see, so each one of us, in our dealings with others abroad, puts his meddlesomeness, like an eye, into his maliciousness.2

Outside of the context of this particular myth, the lamia had a more generic role in antiquity as a bugaboo for children — “Eat your broccoli, Clitus, or the lamia will devour you whole and feast on your blood.” Strabo refers to this time-honored parenting technique in his first century Geographica:

[We] relate to children pleasing tales to incite them [to any course] of action, and frightful ones to deter them, such as those of Lamia, Gorgo, Ephialtes, and Mormolyca.

As far as I can tell, this more generic lamia is due to the etymological associations with the Greek λαμυρός (lamuros), which means “gluttonous” and is related to the English larynx. Some sources also connect the word to lemur, because lemurs (as I’ve written about before) are actually scary and wicked despite their cute, furry faces. By the second century AD (most notably in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana) Lamiae get a new origin story as serpents transformed into witches, and — having expanded their horizons beyond children — are swanning about seducing men and devouring them, a tendency which Keats somehow manages to make rather swoony and romantic in his 1819 poem Lamia:

Then Lamia breath’d death breath; the sophist's eye,

Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,

Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well

As her weak hand could any meaning tell,

Motion'd him to be silent; vainly so,

He look'd and look'd again a level—No!

“A Serpent!” echoed he; no sooner said,

Than with a frightful scream she vanished

Lamia is also a kind of flatfish and a species of owl, both of which are considerably nicer things to think about.

Meaning: A demony, serpenty lady who drinks children’s blood and eats men whole, which we simply cannot endorse here even in cases where it’s deserved.

Origin: Greek λαμυρός, meaning “gluttonous”

Wordle’s view: TOO SCARY. But we’re confident we can achieve roughly the same effect with today’s word, “BITEY.”

A gleek is a jest or a trick, as in, “It was just a gleek, man! Don’t be such a lamia!” There’s an awful lot of dignified hedging in the OED about where exactly the word comes from, but it’s probably related to “glee” and therefore my personal favorite (don’t ask) Proto-Indo-European root *ghel-, which means “to shine” and which gives us a truly astonishing array of words including yellow, green, glance, glide, gloat, glitter, melancholy(?!), and glib. In fact, if you ever see a “gl-” word like “glow,” “gleam,” “glass,” or I guess “gleek” in the wild, there’s a very strong chance that *ghel- is its daddy.

Meaning: A gibe, a jest, a trick, or (more rarely), a coquettish look

Origin: Really looks like it’s a diminutive form of “glee” — not sure why the OED won’t just come out and say it

Wordle’s view: You’ve got to be gleeking us. Today’s word is “TIRED.”

Speaking of “tired,” sloom is a truly precious and magical word that means “to have a little sleep,” as in what I intend to do right now, thank you very much. See you next week hopefully!

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At the bottom of a breathtakingly dull late 15th century manuscript entitled Grammatica, the exhausted scribe (who signs his name Wulrey de Plecy1) has left us a little rhyming note unrelated to the text itself:

Nunc scripsi totum pro christo da mihi potum.

Now that I’ve written all of this, for Christ’s sake give me a drink. 

There is something rather magical about how this little aside makes the alienating distance of 500 years disappear in an instant. How the sudden intrusion of pique and humor cuts right through the ages and the unfamiliar language to make a human connection.2 And it makes me think in particular of another oft-quoted Medieval artifact from the same era — the odd little compendium that’s one of our earliest sources for the “terms of venery,” the extensive group of collective nouns for animals whose playfulness and inventiveness comes alive again each time they’re rediscovered. 

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Plenty of these collective nouns are commonplace (or at least familiar) today: Swarm of bees, gaggle of geese, pack of hounds, pride of lions, flock of sheep, flight of swallows, and even murder of crows and murmuration of starlings are unlikely to raise much of an eyebrow. But as accustomed as we are to schools3 of fish and herds of deer, the wit and invention that went into these classifications comes right back into view when you encounter one that’s more or less fallen out of the language, such as exaltation of larks, or paddling of ducks, or unkindness of ravens. As James Lipton (the guy from Inside the Actors’ Studio, who is, weirdly, one of the main reasons these words haven’t faded into obscurity) says in his book on the subject:

 “What we have in these terms is clearly the end result of a game that amateur philologists have been playing for over five hundred years.”

And I think he’s put his finger on the same thing that made me associate the terms of venery with the relatable grumbling of poor old Wulrey de Plecy. History, and language, have a weight to them that makes a construction like pride of lions feel authoritative, natural, inevitable. But when you see it in context, alongside shrewdness of apes, skulk of foxes, or business of flies — as well as the equivalent terms for groups of people, such as hastiness of cooks, promise of bartenders, or (wonderfully) incredulity of cuckolds — it comes roaring back to life not just as a fanciful piece of terminology, but as a playful invention whose creators were in on the joke.

The key text here is The Book of St. Albans, a 1486 manuscript that is likely a compilation from various different sources, but which is attributed to Dame Juliana Barnes,4 making her one of the earliest English women to get a byline. The Book of St. Albans is a “courtesy book,” a “manual of conduct for a considerable number of people who longed to know how to conduct themselves in a changing world,” as Marjorie Gray Wynne, the rare books librarian at Yale where a copy of the manuscript is housed described it. Oddly enough, Arthur Conan Doyle (on a break from Sherlock Holmes in 1906) included a lengthy scene in his novel Sir Nigel imagining how a young knight might receive instruction on the terms of venery contained in such a book: 

“The old Knight shook his white head doubtfully. “There is so much to be learned that there is no one who can be said to know all,” said he. “For example, Nigel, it is sooth that for every collection of beasts of the forest, and for every gathering of birds of the air, there is their own private name so that none may be confused with another.” 

Although it’s not the earliest book of this sort to contain nouns of assembly (or “gatherations” as they’re sometimes rather nicely called), The Book of St. Albans is the most extensive, with 164 separate collective nouns for animals, people, and objects ranging in kind from onomatopoeic (a peep of chicks, a clattering of choughs) to descriptive (a trip of hares, a leap of leopards, an eloquence of lawyers) to ominous (a tiding of magpies, a damnation of jurors) to straight-up mean (an intoxication of cobblers, a worthlessness of jugglers, an abominable sight of monks,5 and an impatience of wives). 

There have been a number of worthy additions to the corpus since 1486 (my personal favorite is an unemployment of graduates,6 though C.S. Lewis’s parliament of owls has by far the best claim for actual adoption in the language), but there’s a wealth of lovely old ones to be found in the original manuscripts. For my part, now that I’ve written all of this — for Christ’s sake give me a drink. 

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My earliest experiences of the unique British torture device known as the Cryptic Crossword Puzzle were when my grandparents would retire to their armchairs and solemnly solve The Times daily cryptic together after lunch, with a brandy probably. My grandfather would take charge of the paper itself and carefully read out each clue followed by the number of blanks and any already filled-in letters, and my grandmother would listen attentively, brow furrowed and pen and notepad at the ready to expertly disassemble any sneaky anagrams that were foolish enough to emerge from their foxholes. For anyone unfamiliar with the cryptic format (such as 8-year-old me), the scene would play out like a dream sequence, with all the appearance but none of the underpinnings of a logical conversation. “Make poor spelling naughty in a down clue …” my grandfather would read out (for instance)  “... ‘I,’ six blanks, ‘I,’ blank, blank.” And then they’d both sit in contemplative silence for 30 seconds before one of them would, improbably, shout, “Impoverish!” and move on to the next.1  

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I witnessed this loving and rather beautiful ritual countless times, but there are two specific answers that have remained lodged in my memory all these years, although I’ve sadly forgotten important parts of the clues that led to them. The first is SCARAB, a fairly common crossword beetle that also happened to be the first cryptic solution I ever shouted out myself. And the second, oddly enough, is LEADSMAN, a word that, even at the time, struck me as a frankly insane piece of vocabulary for anyone to know in the first place,2 let alone to summon up (as my grandfather confidently did) based on a deliberately misleading nonsense fragment about the American author Mark Twain (that’s the only part of the clue that I do remember).

All of this is, of course, a preposterously roundabout way of introducing my topic today, which is the interesting and in some cases surprising origins of various literary pen names. Now that we’re three paragraphs deep and have scared off most casual readers, we can begin. 

Mark Twain

The origin of  Samuel Clemens’s pen name is a leadsman’s cry. The “lead” (as in the metal) that the leadsman wielded was a sounding line.3 And the purpose of the sounding line was to determine the depth of the water so nobody runs aground, which is a bad thing to do, especially when you’re in a boat. The marks on the lead-weighted sounding line indicated fathoms of depth, and the leadsmen would call out to indicate how many marks on the line they were from the bottom. Mark twain (as in the archaic word for “two”) was the second such mark — a depth of two fathoms, or 12 feet, which is, FWIW, pretty dangerous shallows for a riverboat! Get out of there! Mark Twain describes the sounding process in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi:

The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.

'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three!... Quarter-less three!... Half twain!... Quarter twain!... M-a-r-k twain!... Quarter-less—'

A final gloss on this is that mark twain isn’t the only sounding call with an afterlife: It’s from a leadsman’s cry that we get the term deep six, which is six fathoms deep, or, if you’re feeling whimsical, three marks twain.  

Lewis Carroll 

The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, which should be blindingly obvious to anyone who’s in the habit of translating people’s names into Latin, reversing them, and then translating them back into English again. Charles Lutwidge, Latinized, becomes Carolus Ludovic; and Ludovic Carolus, anglicized, becomes Lewis Carroll. 

More accurately (and much less tidily), Ludovic (meaning “devotee of the Lord”) was the Latin form used in Medieval documents to represent the Germanic Ludwig (with a completely different origin meaning “famed warrior”), which becomes Louis in French and Lewis in English. The surname Lutwidge is actually a place name, from lot, meaning share, and wic, meaning village and familiar from various wichs like Sandwich, Ipswich, and West Bromwich. The Charles/Carolus connection is more straightforward. 

Dodgson gives his pen-name origin story in diary entries from 1856, where we also learn that he was considering an anagram of Charles Lutwidge—Edgar Cuthwellis.

Feb 6: Sent a copy of my verses on 'Solitude' to Mr. Yates for The Train.

Feb 8: Heard from Mr. Yates—he is going to use the verses on 'Solitude', and the 'Carpette Knyghte'. He wishes me to alter the signature ‘B.B.’ and proposed that I should adopt some 'Nom de plume': Accordingly I sent ‘Dares’ [from Daresbury in Cheshire, where he was born].

Feb 10: Heard again from Mr. Yates—he wants me to choose another name, as Dares is too much like a newspaper signature.

Feb. 11: Wrote to Mr. Yates sending him a choice of names: 1. Edgar Cuthwellis (made by transposition out of 'Charles Lutwidge'). 2. Edgar U.C. Westhill (ditto). 3. Louis Carroll, (derived from Lutwidge = Ludovic = Louis, and Charles [Carolus]. 4. Lewis Carroll.

George Orwell

“How important names are. If I have the choice of going through two streets, other things being equal I always go by the one with the nicer name.”

—George Orwell, to a friend

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, who disliked the stuffiness of his first name (“It took me nearly thirty years to work off the effects of being called Eric,” he told a friend in 19404) and (allegedly) the Scottishness of his surname. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, he chose the pen name “partly to avoid embarrassing his parents, partly as a hedge against failure, and partly because he disliked the name Eric, which reminded him of a prig in a Victorian boys’ story.”

This feels like a particularly unfair hit on Erics, who are generally a decent sort in my personal experience, but in Orwell’s case it’s actually literally true. The name Eric (from the Old Norse Eiríkr meaning “ever ruler,” which absolutely owns) wasn’t popular in England until the publication in 1858 of Eric, or Little by Little, a morality tale about a fatuous little prude who goes to boarding school and strays from the righteous path but not in a fun way.  As the preface to the novel (by Dean Frederic W. Farrar) describes it: 

The story of 'Eric' was written with but one single object—the vivid inculcation of inward purity and moral purpose, by the history of a boy who, in spite of the inherent nobility of his disposition, falls into all folly and wickedness, until he has learnt to seek help from above.

Farrar’s contemporary, the (truly wonderful) children’s author E. Nesbit, does a much better job of summing it up in her 1913 novel Wet Magic: 

The children also had been provided with books—Eric, or Little by Little; Elsie, or Like a Little Candle; Brave Bessie and Ingenious Isabel had been dealt out as though they were cards for a game, before leaving home. They had been a great bother to carry, and they were impossible to read. 

At any rate, “Eric” was a nonstarter. After briefly considering and (mercifully) discarding the idea of going by “X” for the publication of his first book (“I suppose the thing is to have an easily memorable [pseudonym], which I could stick to if this book had any success,” he told his agent), the author produced a list of four names: P. S. Burton, Kenneth Miles, H. Lewis Allways, and George Orwell. I can’t find anything definitive about the significance of the discarded names, except that P. S. Burton was “an alias he had used on tramping expeditions” (does everyone have a cool tramping alias and I just missed out somehow?5), but George was likely chosen for its quintessential Englishness (Saint George being the patron saint of England) and Orwell was (and indeed still is) a river in Suffolk.  

Lol, I had like 10 more of these origin stories, but I absolutely cannot be allowed to go past 1,500 words, so I’m going to save them for a future newsletter. I hope you enjoyed the three questionably necessary paragraphs dancing on poor old Dean Frederic Farrar’s grave more than you want to know where the name John Le Carré comes from! There’s actually some real mystery around it, but my preliminary research indicates that it isn’t a tramping alias, so it’s probably not that important after all.

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I’m sure Bill Clinton would prefer to be remembered for (almost) any quote other than the galaxy-brained baffler, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” from his grand jury testimony in 1998. But the phrase lives fully rent-free in my brain, especially when I think (as, troublingly, I often do) about the “Is Is” situation — what linguists (who, in a way that I find deeply charming, love to make very interesting things sound breathtakingly dull) call the “double copula.” The context, for those who don’t remember or would prefer to forget, was that the president had been asked to admit the falsehood of a statement by his attorney about an affidavit filed by Monica Lewinsky “that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.” Clinton’s point, from a grammatical perspective at least, is, well, unimpeachable (sorry): The use of the present indefinite “is” can imply a more or less permanent state of affairs or something that is currently ongoing and doesn’t necessarily stretch back into the past. “Is the Earth round?” Yes. “Is there any cake?” Well, no, but that’s because I ate the cake that once was for my tea. 

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But where that leaves us w/r/t the “Is Is” conundrum is precisely nowhere (again, sorry – 100% my fault for starting this where I started it). You’ll often hear “Is Is” in statements like the following:

“The thing is, is I ate the cake for my tea.” 

“What I mean is, is that the Earth is round.”

“What I’d really like is, is for this grand jury to stop asking me questions about my affair.”

Lots of people use “Is Is” constructions, though it looks quite odd in a transcript. In keeping with our presidential theme, President Obama is a veritable connoisseur of the form, as is George W. Bush. Language Log has gone to the trouble of collecting a nice little library of Obama Is-Is-isms, but you can get the gist from just a couple. I find that it feels very natural and right hearing it in speech, but looks quite odd when written down. 

“The bottom line, though, is, is that they’ve still got to meet those basic criteria.”

“We’ve made great strides in the coordination and cooperation between our two governments over the last several years … uh, but my suspicion is, is that things can be improved.”

But so what’s going on here? It sounds right, but it makes no grammatical sense at all. FWIW, there is a version of Is-Is-ification that is grammatically sound: When you say something like, “What the problem is is that you ate my cake for your tea,”1 the first part of the sentence is a dependent clause and the subject of the sentence, which you can make better sense of if you rearrange the sentence to be “That you ate my cake for your tea is what the problem is.” But that’s not what’s going on here!

So what is going on? Well, theories abound (linguists have been on the case since at least the ’80s). One notion is that the second “is” is doing a job that should rightfully have gone to a “that”2 (“the thing is [that] I ate the cake for my tea”). It’s nice and elegant, but it doesn’t make sense of the Is-is-isms that already have a “that” (like Obama’s “The bottom line is, is that they’ve still got to meet those criteria” above). Alternatively (or, I suppose, additionally), it might be a clue to the existence of a secret “what” that has been lurking in the shadows all along and whose miraculous reappearance would render the sentence grammatical: “[What] the thing is is that I ate the cake for my tea” scans just fine because you can reverse it — “That I ate the cake for my tea is what the thing is.” A third theory is that our funny little extra “is” is simply there as a signpost to alert listeners that the sentence is about to change direction or introduce surprising new information. I don’t like this theory primarily on the grounds that it is a snooze. 

There is a unified theory of Is-Is-ification, which is that the parasite “is” is acting as a boundary between the introduction of a topic with a clause like “The fact is” and the promised commentary on the topic, like, “I’ve eaten too much cake” or, “I’ve done some decidedly unfortunate things in the Oval Office.” 

I’ll leave you with two final thoughts: Firstly, there is such a thing as a “triple copula” (“The thing is, is, is …”), which I frankly don’t have the stamina to try to make sense of. And there’s also a variety of Was-Is-ification (“The thing was, is that the cake was extremely tasty”), though it doesn’t work the other way round (“The thing is, was”), which is interesting and kind of funny to think about. Now I’m off to go find some cake.  

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When I was a tweenager, I looked up the origin of my name (not to date myself, but it was probably in a physical book of some kind) and was given a profoundly unsatisfying, unelaborated one-word answer: Jack means “Supplanter.” I’ll note, as a brief aside here, that while most men my age named Jack are secret Johns, I am a pure, unprocessed, unadulterated Jack, just like my impossibly numerous Gen-Alpha brethren, whose mothers are forever shouting after them at the playground and looking at me weird when I turn around expectantly. 

I have since confirmed that this terse, unlikely etymology is actually more-or-less true: Jacks start appearing in the record in the 13th century, and the word “jack” (as I have been hyper-aware for my whole life) has a long, varied, and vibrant history, initially as a generic catch-all meaning something like what we mean when we say “bro” nowadays, as in “jack of all trades,”1 “every man-jack of them,” and “jack-tar” (sailor-bro, essentially). The idea of “jack” as a generic guy was carried over to describe objects that do generic work, like the “jack” a mechanic might use, and to refer generically to male animals, as in “jackass” and “jackdaw” (donkey-bro and daw-bro, lol). For the same reason, “jack” has a history as a slang term for a penis (this only survives nowadays in the vulgar “jack off”) as well as for toilets (more familiar from every cut-rate fantasy novel you’ve ever read as the archaic “jakes” or — and it’s a relief to see my John-coded compatriots bear some of the brunt of this — the more modern “johns”). 

But the real origin of Jack as a name is from the Middle English jankin (cute!), and (by a completely different route via the Old French) as a nickname for Jacob, which comes to us through the Greek Ἰάκωβος and ultimately the Hebrew Yaʿăqōḇ, meaning (rather surprisingly) “heel-grabber” — Genesis 26 is explicit on this: “After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob” — or, less literally, “supplanter” (i.e., someone who takes the place of another as Jacob did to Esau — homeboy never let go of that heel). Which brings us more or less back where we started. 

But and so the point of all this is that “Jack” is a name that sounds (to me at least) like it shouldn’t have a traceable etymology through Old French and Greek and Hebrew even though it does, which got me wondering whether there are common names that sound like they should have ancient origins but don’t. Here are a few rather interesting ones. 

Vanessa

If you look up “Vanessa” in a baby names book, you’ll get the answer that “Vanessa” means “Butterfly,” which is true, but not really. The naturalist Johann Fabricius did give the name Vanessa to a genus of butterfly from the family Nymphalidae (this will become important) in 1808, but the etymologies that cite a Greek origin for the name are highly suspect. 

A much more likely source is the first appearance of “Vanessa” in English, about 90 years earlier, in Jonathan Swift’s poem Cadenus and Vanessa, where the titular Vanessa is referred to as a “nymph” almost a dozen times. Swift had invented the name as a sneaky reference to his lover, Esther Vanhomrigh, by transposing the first syllable of her last name with the first syllable of her first name. Which is all very sweet until you learn that he abandoned her for a second Esther, whom he called “Stella,” another name invented by a poet (its first appearance in English is in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella), albeit with a real Latin root, meaning “star.” 

Imogen

I’ve written about ghost words before — which tend to appear in the language due to a printers’ error of some kind — and Imogen, really a rather lovely name, is a ghost in more ways than one. Her first appearance in English is as the heroine of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, which George Bernard Shaw called “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order,” something I’m only mentioning because it’s very funny to neg Shakespeare like that. 

The problem is that all evidence points to the fact that Imogen was actually Innogen, after the 12th century Innogen, Queen Consort to Brute the Trojan, which is just such an incredibly metal thing to be called that it almost defies belief. A printers’ error presumably mistook those two “n”s for a single “m,” and Imogen was born. She would later go on to write “Hide and Seek,” which still absolutely owns. 

An interesting coda to this story is that Cymbeline isn’t the first appearance of an Innogen in Shakespeare. Dr. Oliver Tearle points out in a useful explainer that there is a ghost Innogen in Much Ado About Nothing — she was originally Hero’s mother in a stage direction, until an 18th century editor named Lewis Theobald mercilessly excised her from the play:

I have ventured to expunge [this name]; there being no mention of her through the play, no one speech addressed to her, nor one syllable spoken to her. Neither is there any one passage, from which we have any reason to determine that Hero's mother was living. 

Which feels a bit of a harsh punishment for just keeping quiet and minding your own business, but so it goes. 

Wendy

Wendy does occur a scattering of times in English before J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan burst onto the scene in 1904, possibly as a diminutive of the Welsh Gwendolyn or Gwendydd (the element “gwen-” means “white” or “shining,” and can also be seen in Guinevere and, in a roundabout way, Fiona, another name coined by a writer, the Scottish poet William Sharp). 

But there’s no question that the name’s popularity is entirely due to the success of Peter Pan, and Peter Pan’s Wendy is no Gwendolyn: J.M. Barrie named his Wendy in memory of a friend’s young daughter, Margaret Henley, who looked up to Barrie and called him her “friendy,” pronounced as “Fwendy-wendy.” It’s a sweet and heartbreaking story made more so by Barrie’s letter to her father after her death:

“It is very pathetic to me, your visit to that little grave. I shall go there too some day. She flits thro’ the opening of my story, which is now in America.”

Incidentally, Margaret’s father was W. E. Henley, author of the absolutely bangin’ poem Invictus and inspiration (due to his amputated leg) for the character Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Stevenson confessed as much in a letter to his friend: 

“I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island.  Of course, he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.”

I didn’t expect to end this on such a tearful note, but Stevenson — who did not have biological children, though he wished to — also consoled his friend in a letter after “Wendy”’s death, writing: 

“There is one thing I always envied you, and that I envy you still.”

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Also! I’ve made you a cryptic puzzle, which is at the end of this article. If you’re new to cryptics or want to brush up, my quick cryptic crosswords crash course begins here.

We aim to be useful as well as entertaining here at On Words and Up Words, so my goal this week is to prepare readers with a suave and alluring answer for the next time you’re out with a hot date who asks you what your favorite type of linguistic reduplication1 is. It can be tempting in these situations to reach for the obvious answer and say Deprecative Reduplication — that’s anything with a “schm-”: “Table schmable,” “fancy schmancy,”  “deadline schmedline.” But I’ve found that conversation tends to flag after you’ve each named a few of your favorites. Putting a “schm-” in front of words sounds fun in practice, but it becomes tiresome more quickly than you’d think, especially if you make the fatal mistake of trying it with a word like “schmooze” or “schmaltz,” both of which will make you look like a real schmuck in hurry. 

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Worse yet is to hit the panic button and say Baby Talk Reduplication — a little bit of “choo-choo,” a dash of “night night,” a sprinkle of “pee pee.” (Sorry, that last one was inartfully phrased.) I have nothing in particular against babies, but they are tiresome and bad conversationalists, neither of which are traits that you want to be modeling on a hot date. I count about six other responses you could give (at least as far as Reduplication in English is concerned), but if your goal is to impress without overplaying your hand, I’d like to put in a strong word for the cool new kid on the block (relatively speaking) — the imposingly named “Contrastive Focus Reduplication.” 

Also known as “Identical Constituent Compounding,” which doesn’t do it any favors at all, or “lexical cloning,” which is too scary to even think about, CF Reduplication is how we end up with the Salad Salad situation. This happens when you’re faced with a salad like potato salad, which is not a salad salad (don’t @ me; I think potato salad is the absolute tits), alongside a salad like caesar salad, which is a salad salad, affording you the unique and enviable opportunity to say, “Please pass the salad — the salad salad, I mean,” which shouldn’t make any sense at all, but somehow it does. While other reduplications are content to play fancy-schmancy little rhyme games2 with one word or another, “Salad Salad” reduplication can reduplicate an entire discrete phrase and still be (more or less) intelligible. In addition to the salad (which comes from a famous paper on the topic), canonical examples of this phenomenon are “Do you like him, or do you like like him?” and “She’s rich, but she’s not rich rich.” But there’s no reason you couldn’t use its powerful effects for a majestically inane but somehow still comprehensible exchange like:

“Did you go to the grocery store and get eggs like I asked?”

“Well,  I didn’t go to the grocery store and get eggs go to the grocery store and get eggs, but I did draw you this nice picture of an omelet.”3

In fact, the effect of this type of reduplication — which is to contrast the prototypical version of a concept (e.g., green salad) with a nonstandard version of the same concept (e.g., potato salad) — can be achieved as long as you can imagine an alternative version of the concept, but it falls apart with words or units that are only there for syntax. The Salad Salad paper gives some interesting counterexamples to illustrate this. You can say “Are you sick, or are you sick sick?” but you can’t meaningfully say:

*“Are you sick, or ARE-are you sick?”

Other attempts at salad salad reduplication that don’t pass muster are: 

*“I didn't just read the book, I read THE-the book!”

A: “Did you go to Montreal?”

B: *“Well, not TO-to.”

There are a few other interesting rules that govern what you can and can’t salad-salad: For one thing, bits and pieces of plurals and past-tense indicators don’t necessarily get duplicated during the salad-salading process: “I didn’t just scream, I scream screamed” (as opposed to screamed-screamed) and “Some frat bros are fine, but frat bro frat bros are to be avoided at all costs” (as opposed to frat bros-frat bros). And the more familiar an idiom is, or the more commonly words in a phrase tend to be seen together, the easier it is to salad-salad the whole thing without sounding like a lunatic. “I’m going to let him have it let him have it” is broadly acceptable, but  *“I’m going to give John a right old talking to give John a right old talking to” feels completely wrong somehow, even if John deserves it.

Some languages take their reduplication very seriously, duplicating words or parts of words to do important things like creating plurals, and maybe we’ll get around to that one day in English, but not until we’ve done the hard, noble work of distinguishing the different types of salad from one another. Anyway, now I’m worried that you’re going to go out on a hot date and they’re not going to ask you what your favorite type of linguistic reduplication is, in which case this whole thing has been a waste of time. 

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Maybe you can talk about this cryptic crossword puzzle that I have made for you instead! The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in (and find annotated solutions) with a click! 

Fun fact for people who still “talk on the phone”: We tend to say “OK” as a signal that the conversation is still ongoing, and “Alright” when we’re ready to stop. Once you’re aware of it, it’s impossible not to notice, so I guess … sorry or you’re welcome. Alan Metcalf, who has written a comprehensive history of “OK,” notes that one of its distinguishing features is that it “affirms without evaluating,” which is to say that by itself, it’s completely neutral — you have to add a qualifier to it (“OK, great!” or “OK, I guess”) to indicate precisely what sort of OK we’re dealing with. And when it’s used as an adjective, it’s one of those rare modifiers that doesn’t pass the “very” test: You can’t say that something is “very OK” or even “moderately OK” any more than you can say that one thing is “OKer” than another thing. 

Despite refusing to play well with intensifying adverbs, “OK” is shockingly versatile — it also moonlights as an adjective, as in “an OK idea;” an adverb, as in “I’m doing OK;” and a noun, as in “give your OK,” not to mention the marvelous “lecturer’s OK,” which is when you look off into the middle distance, mutter “OK” to yourself, and begin to address the room on a new topic. And it’s so ubiquitous as an interjection that it has mutated into various forms that add different shades of meaning to the neutral assent that made it indispensable to early users of the telegraph in the late 19th century and took it from an absurdist joke to one of the most used words in any language ever. To most people, the typed “kk” is a way of softening “OK” to indicate a sort of chipper “can do!” as opposed to the glum assent that an unpunctuated “ok” seems to indicate in a text-based conversation. And depending on how old you are, you may be more or less inclined to agree with me that a solitary “k” means something rather closer to “fuck off and die” than “alright” or “that’s great.” 

I’ve seen some corroboration for the claim that “kk” started life in the ’90s as a further abbreviation for “k, kewl,” which is fun to think about just because of how unbelievably ’90s that is, but, while this may well be a valid origin, it almost certainly also appeared organically via reduplication — a common process in language that can (among other things) add emphasis to an idea. We can also see reduplication at work in “Okie dokie,” or the Flanders variation “Okily Dokily,” both of which convey (to my mind) roughly the same sentiment as “kk,” except dorkier. 

As I’ve written elsewhere, “OK” started out life as “o. k.” (a lowercase abbreviation with a space!), and other forms have come and gone over the years, including “oke” (pronounced to rhyme with “oak”), which was the 1920s’ solution for sanding down OK’s rougher edges, as this 1929 article on slang in The Philadelphia Inquirer (cited by Metcalf in his book) makes clear: 

As in non-collegiate circles, the ponderous O. K. has given way to the snappier “oke.” There is a sonorous note about this expression, the compiler says, which has made its vogue immense. Among elite slangsters, in fact, it has almost completely ousted older expressions. 

“Okeh” was the preferred OK of Woodrow Wilson, among others (probably because of an apocryphal etymology that the word owes its origins to the Choctaw okeh, meaning “it is”), and over at Literary Hub, Johnny Diamond makes a strong case for the simple “ok” on the grounds that it’s the easiest and least ugly of the available options. The phonetic “okay” still holds sway in some circles, particularly when it’s being used as a verb, as it can accommodate all the whistles and bells that go along with being a verb (okaying, okays, okayed) more easily than in other forms, and there’s some evidence that it’s winning a war of attrition against some of its ancestors.

The OK that’s preferred by the AP Stylebook (“Do not use okay”), and which I’ve been using canonically here, is an initialism, like USA, FAQ, FUBAR, or (for my third wave emo friends) MCR, who, confusingly, spell “OK” as “Okay” and — in particularly intense moments — pronounce it as “Whoa-kay,” which adds an entirely new dimension of emotionality to the word. 

OK, so where does that leave us in terms of which OK to OK? Well, I obviously think that “OK” is the okayest, but I’d be OK with okaying “Okay” or even “ok,” as long as we’re all agreed that “k” is (in the immortal words of Gerard Way) NOT WHOA-KAY.

Regular readers will know that I occasionally like to take a break from the hard but essential work of drawing attention to very silly words in order to harangue people about how much fun they could be having if they spent more time doing cryptic crossword puzzles. This week has provided an excellent opportunity to do just that in the form of an exceptional puzzle by the setter Picaroon in The Guardian that manages to do three deceptively hard things all at once: It offers something quite novel to the format. It fairly and consistently follows all the rules. And it’s easy! (Other setters can weigh in on this, but I’ve found that one of the very hardest parts of setting a cryptic puzzle is making clues that are both fun and gentle for a solver.) 

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If you’d like to have a crack at it before I spoil some of the clues below, you can find Picaroon’s lovely April Fools puzzle here. But I enjoyed this puzzle so much that I thought it’d be fun for folks who may not be hardened cryptic solvers yet to take a look at its innards with me. (And if you want a brush-up on what-all is going on with cryptic puzzles, my quick cryptics crash course starts here.) 

Onto the puzzle! The conceit of the April Fools joke is that a typo-ridden draft of the puzzle intended for the editor’s eyes only has accidentally been published for all to see (it’s doubly funny because The Guardian, affectionately known to readers as The Grauniad, was renowned for its typos in the ’70s). The setter’s name is spelled wrong (“Picaron”), and the “Special Instructions” are a garbled filename that includes the wrong puzzle number in the extension. But despite its appearance as a private draft for the crosswords editor, each of the clues works perfectly without any special knowledge required of the solver. A few of my favorites:

Ran away with the Spanish [This needs work – ed.] (6)

The answer is ELOPED, a word that means “ran away with,” and which can also be constructed from the other elements of the clue: El (“the,” in Spanish), Op. (“work” as in the musical abbreviation for opus, which means “work”), and Ed. (not the editor in this case, but the suffix for a simple past tense word). Repunctuating the clue slightly, that’s: RAN AWAY WITH = “The,” Spanish. [This needs] “work” + “-ed.”  

Latin song? [Needs rewriting, along with 1 Down] (6)

This clue is a partial anagram (as we’re told explicitly by “needs rewriting”). The answer is LOSING, a word that means “Down” (the definition part of the clue is at the end this time), and which can be constructed out of “L” (a common abbreviation for “Latin”) + “I” (the Roman numeral for “1”) and the letters of SONG. If you repunctuate the clue, you can see this more clearly: “Latin” + “song” needs rewriting along with “I” = DOWN.

Expression of understanding [A bit imprecise – ed.] (1,3)

Despite the novelty of the note to the editor, this is a simple, classic “hidden” clue. The answer, I SEE (an “expression of understanding”) can be found in “a bit” of “imprecise — ed.” Repunctuated, that’s: EXPRESSION OF MISUNDERSTANDING = A bit: imprecISE Ed.

Rule out / what spin doctors do [Faulty clue – ed.] (8)

Another triumph of this puzzle is that the setter is at great pains not to repeat the same mechanic across different clues. This is our third “ed.” in a clue, which works nicely for the theme, but it’s also our third distinct use of the “ed” conceit. In the first, it was the -ed suffix for a past tense word. In the second it was part of a hidden clue. And here, it makes up two letters of a partial anagram. The answer to this one, defined by “rule out,” is PRECLUDE. It’s a combination of P.R. (what spin doctors do) and an anagram (indicated by “faulty”) of “clue ed.” So: RULE OUT = “what spin doctors do” + faulty “clue ed.” Neat!

Barrack and Michelle ultimately getting huge backing (4)

Because of its clever theme, this puzzle can also get away with outrageous typos that just wouldn’t feel right in a different context. It does this in a few different ways across various clues, but I’ll end with my favorite. The answer here is GIBE — a secondary meaning of “barrack,” which occurs here in keeping with the theme as an “accidental” misspelling of Barack Obama’s first name. We get to “GIBE” by taking the final letter of “Michelle” (Michelle ultimately), adding it to “big” (huge), and spelling the whole thing backwards (backing). Thus: BARRACK = michellE, ultimately, getting “huge” — backing. (E + BIG, reversed.)

Anyway, congrats to Picaroon on a scorcher of a puzzle. It’s one of the great remaining delights of the increasingly dreary Internet when you come across something like this, where someone has used their craft and their creativity to breathe new life into a familiar format just to make us smile.

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It’s widely known that those incurable squares over at Wordle have never had a minute of fun in their entire lives. This is why Wordlebot (the New York Times’s constipated bureaucrat of a Wordle analyzer) recommends that prospective Wordlers choose their starter words from the feckless trio of CRANE, SLATE, and CRATE — respectively, history’s dullest long-necked bird, a tablet that old, dead people used to do their Geometry homework on, and a box to store all your dreams of color and light in the attic where they can’t get out. 

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Wordlebot gives each of these soporific dullards a 99 out of a possible 99 points if you use it as a starter (how convenient that Wordlebot’s own favorite words to open with should garner such a high score!), and if your goal is to please the moth-eaten automatons who staff the Wordle desk of the New York Times, you’d better paint within the rigid lines that they’ve laid out for you or prepare to suffer the consequences. But if you are willing to shun the prudish dogma of the Wordle intelligentsia and bask in the light of nature, a whole glorious world of illicit five-letter starter words will be revealed to you, and you can soar on their exquisite currents like a scarlet ibis (history’s most interesting long-necked bird) and dance the Wordle dance of the gods. Here are 11 starter words that’ll really tick Wordlebot off. 

One of the three things that a nixie can be is a Germanic water sprite, which is already quite interesting. The folkloric nixie has a human top and a fish bottom much like Princess Ariel does, and it lures people into the water for the purpose of drowning them, much like Princess Ariel presumably doesn’t, though I can’t say for sure until I watch The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea. The word was first introduced into English by Sir Walter Scott in the following passage from his Waverly novel, The Antiquary, which raises a lot more troubling questions about an entity called the Oak-King than it answers: 

“Why performed in such a solitude, and by what class of choristers, were questions which the terrified imagination of the adept, stirred with all the German superstitions of nixies, oak-kings, wer-wolves, hobgoblins, black spirits and white, blue spirits and grey, durst not even attempt to solve.”

Via a different etymology, “nixie” can also mean “a letter whose address cannot be determined by the postal service due to bad handwriting,” and it has a related, obsolete adverbial form that means something like, “emphatically not.” This means, rather satisfyingly, that you can write a coherent but sad short story about a doomed romance between a German mermaid with bad handwriting and a British fairy with pointed ears that goes, “Did the nixie’s nixie reach the pixie? Nixie.”

Wordlebot respectfully1 thinks that NIXIE is a bad starter word. 

In a stunning repudiation to those of us who’ve been describing things that look like the letter “H” as “aitchey,” there is an actual word that means “in the shape of the letter H,” and it is “zygal.” It comes to us via the Greek ζυγόν, which means “yoke” (a vaguely H-shaped contraption) and it shares its earliest origins with a root that gives us (through the Latin) “join” and “conjugal,” and (by way of Sanskrit) “yoga.” Wordlebot gives it a D+. 

In addition to providing an absolutely choice rhyme for “zygal” in the event that you’re writing an inscrutably lewd poem, “pygal” has the exquisite good judgment to mean “of, relating to, or in the region of the buttocks.” This is, naturally, very funny. It comes to us from the Greek πυγή, meaning “rump,” which also gives us the marvelous “callipygian” (nice-buttocked) and the slightly unwieldy “pygophilous” (buttock-besmitten). Wordlebot, surprisingly, doesn’t hate it! 

“Snash” means “insolence,” as in “enough of your snash, Wordlebot.” But as a verb, it means (likely onomatopoeically) “biting at hastily or noisily,” giving us the breathtakingly good Scots word for sweets and pastries, “snashters,” inspired by an equally wonderful Middle Low German word “snascherie,” meaning “the eating of dainties.”

Wordlebot says, fine, whatever. 

“Mivvy” is an early 20th century British slang word likely derived from “marvel,” and it means “expert,” as in “I’m pretty mivvy at the Wordle.” I’ve included it here because it really cheeses Wordlebot off. 

An “ouphe” is another word for an elf, a goblin, or, more specifically a goblin changeling like my 6-year-old (I suspect). Shakespeare is rather fond of ouphes, and they show up in a decidedly bonkers but ultimately successful plot to trick Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor:

Nan Page my daughter and my little son

And three or four more of their growth we'll dress

Like urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white,

With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,

And rattles in their hands.

Interestingly, this is the direct origin of the common “oaf” and “oafish.” Wordlebot is too exhausted to complain about it. 

Despite what will prove to be a truly abysmal Wordlebot score, “feeze” is a gem of a word. Via the Old English fésian, “to drive away,” it has a few related meanings that are all quite lovely. As a verb, it can mean “to frighten or alarm” like its close (and more familiar) relative “faze,” but for a brief, glorious period in the early 19th century, one could be in a feeze, meaning “in a state of alarm,” as in this vertigo-inducing passage from the 1825 historical novel Brother John, or The New Englanders, by John Neal.  

‘By Snum! ; but you’re a precious fellow! — in a feeze , I dare say, at receiving a decent letter, from your sweetheart. Zounds!’

More charmingly still, up until 1675, a “feeze” meant something like “that short little run that you take before doing a great big jump,” which sounds very sweet and wholesome until you see it deployed in this extremely threatening letter quoted in Edmund Campion’s 1571 History of Ireland:

“Be thou sure I had rather in this quarrell die thine enemy, then live thy partner : for the kindnes you proffer mee, and good love in the end of your letter, the best way I can purpose to requite, that is, in advising you though you have fetched your feaze, yet to looke well ere you leape over.”

Wordlebot hates it.  

“Dorty” is a charming little word that means “sulky” or “pettish.” It sounds like it’s going to be related to “dirty,” but it’s actually from a Scots word, “dort,” meaning “a sulk” or “a huff,” which tends to show up in the phrase “in the dorts,” (“in a sulk”), or joined with the name “Meg” as an epithet for a sulky lady, as in Allan Ramsay’s 1725 play, The Gentle Shepherd:

Then fare ye well, Meg Dorts, and e'en's ye like,

I careless cry'd, and lap in o'er the dike.

You can really grab Wordlebot’s attention with this one, but it still thinks you should have picked CRANE.

To “troat” means, very specifically, “to cry out like a rutting buck,” which is very useful if you know someone who does this, because you can roll your eyes and say to yourself, “He’s in a feeze, troating and snashing like a dorty ouphe” — a fantastically bracing thing to say to oneself.  

Wordlebot likes “troat” more than any other word on this list. 🤷

A “quink” is usually defined as “the common brant,” which is decidedly unhelpful of it. In fact, the only thing that could be more unhelpful than defining a “quink” as “the common brant” would be defining a “runch” as “the jointed charlock.” 

Wordlebot wants you to rethink your life and your choices. 

The jointed charlock. 

Wordlebot respectfully requests to be left alone with its thoughts. 

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As the daffodils begin to wriggle their yellowed mops up through the pullulating soil, and the cock robin whistles the horniest jingle he can summon beneath the twiggen balcony of his hen — as spring itself begins, whole-ass, to sproing, the thoughts of a young(ish) man turn, inevitably, to the suffixal bound morpheme known affectionately as the “Ass” intensifier. And what an intensifier it is! As Daniel Siddiqi notes in his seminal-ass paper, “The English Intensifier Ass,”:

“Ass seems to have a requirement that it appear right of the adjective that it is modifying AND left of the head the adjective modifies.”  

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Which is to say that unlike its boring-ass friend, “very,” which primly insists on fussing around behind whatever adjective it’s supposed to be intensifying, “ass” slips in like an assassin (sorry) and intensifies the unsuspecting adjective after the fact but before the noun has a chance to reach the crime scene and survey the damage. Returning to the vernal clownery where we started by way of an example, one could say (depending on the politeness of the company), “That’s one horny-ass cock robin!” but never, “That cock robin is horny-ass.”1 

In “Serious-Ass Morphology: The Anal Emphatic in English,” Diana Elgersma theorizes that “ass” got into the intensifying game after a brief but profitable stint as a nominalizing morpheme, taking adjectives like “bad” and “hard,” and verbs like “kiss” and “whup,” and turning them into nouns like “badass,” “hard-ass,” “kiss-ass,” and “whup-ass,” as in the short, morally instructive fable, “The badass and the hard-ass opened up a can of whup-ass on the kiss-ass.”  

Interestingly, the ass-words formed out of verbs (whup-ass and kiss-ass) are cutthroat compounds, extremely rare combinations where the verb precedes the noun that is its object, as is the case with “cutthroat” or “pickpocket” (normally we do this the other way around in English, saying “backstabber” and “timewaster,” instead of “stabback” and “wastetime.”) 

The nouns, however, are a form of metonymy — taking an attribute of something to signify the whole of the thing — so that “ass” in this case is just a stand-in for a person, which is why most of us intuitively understand that a badass has some bad legs, torso, and attitude to go along with that incorrigible posterior. This same metonymy gives us another glorious “ass” construction in the form of a pronoun: “His ass” or “Her ass” can be surprisingly versatile2 pronouns as seen in statements like, “His ass better have my money” or “I told her ass to hurry up.”3

But how did we get here? One theory about the origin of the “ass” intensifier infix is that it began life in the colorful world of military slang. The earliest written example of the term “big-assed” comes from a 1944 passage in H.L. Mencken’s diaries:

“The marines’ chosen name for their female aides is bams, from big-assed marines.” 

These are, of course, very literal asses that are being referenced, but as time went on, the connection to actual bottoms began to dissipate. By 1945, planes with big tail sections were being called “big-ass birds,” “raggedy-ass” was beginning to shed its direct association with tattered pants (the rather wonderful Raggedy Ass Brigade is attested as early as 1930), and the ass intensifier grew up and left the ample thighs it once called home to seek its fortune. 

From that moment on, the anal emphatic spread its big, beautiful-ass wings, and flew, free from the stifling obligation to point (semantically) at derrieres like a naughty schoolboy and emboldened by a noble mission to populate our greening world with punk-asses, smart-asses, and candy-asses like so many magnificent spring blooms. 

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James Redding Ware was a 19th century British novelist best known for creating (pseudonymously, as Andrew Forrester) one of the first female detectives in fiction — the mysterious Miss G — who bursts onto the scene in the rather unsubtly titled The Female Detective. Miss G (sometimes called Miss Gladden) was making brilliant deductions from far too little evidence more than 40 years before Sherlock Holmes got his start in A Study in Scarlet and almost 70 years before the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, which makes Ware an important early figure in the relatively short history of detective fiction. But nowadays, Ware is far better known for a single 11-word entry in his final piece of writing, a posthumously published dictionary of Victorian London slang called Passing English of the Victorian Era: 

Got the morbs - Temporary melancholia. Abstract noun coined from adjective morbid.

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The revelation that some number of gloomy Victorians were trudging around in dingy London back alleys complaining of “the morbs” is so delightfully on the nose that this passage goes viral every couple of years when Ware’s dictionary is rediscovered. As well as being a rather magnificent turn of phrase for a common ailment, it has something of a contemporary sound to it, which makes it feel more like a modern coinage from a steampunk novel, or a clever Tumblr parody, than a real-ass thing that cool, disaffected teens might have said to one another in Clapham Common in 1909. 

As marvelous as it is, the only real downside of the morbs is that it tends to overshadow everything else in Ware’s dictionary, which is a treasure trove. Morbs, for instance, are not the only thing you might get in Victorian London — Ware has entries for Got the pants (being out of breath), Got a collar on (being stuck up), Got the glow (blushing), Got the shutters up (being surly), Got the perpetual (being a vigorous and “go-ahead” young man, which is probably quite nice but sounds rather tiring for the rest of us), and Got the woefuls (the very next stop on the cursed subway line that starts with the morbs).

Passing English is also a bonanza of colorful vocabulary for the creatively drunk that rivals even Ben Franklin’s Drunkard’s Dictionary in its variety. One might be Arfarfanarf after consuming multiple half pints of ale, Be-argered, which is drunk and argumentative, or Bang through the elephant, a sort of cockney rhyming slang (an elephant’s “trunk” rhymes with “drunk”) that Ware defines rather charmingly as “a finished course of dissipation.” Alongside the Boiled owl (slang for a drunkard that one of Ware’s sources tut-tuts as “a gross libel upon a highly respectable teetotal bird which, even in its unboiled state, drinks nothing stronger than rain-water”) the nicest of all is Altogethery, which is a sloppy, loungey step on the road to completely addled that actually turns up in an 1815 letter by Lord Byron: 

"Like other parties of its kind, it was first silent then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk."

Unless you were a Balloon Juice Lowerer (teetotaler), you were in constant danger, in Ware’s London, of Playing camels (putting away more than you need) with a case of Bellywengins (bad beer) and ending up with a pair of Monday mice (black eyes from a hangover after a bang-through-the-elephant weekend). 

On the plus side, just the right amount of bellywengins (a corruption of “belly vengeance”) might give you the courage to tell people what you really think of them: Ware’s dictionary is chock-full of glorious insults like Barber’s cat (a skinny man), Cabbage garden patriots (meaning “cowards,” in reference to an Irish insurrection that ended ignominiously in a cabbage patch), Enthuzimuzzy (a mocking reference to an embarrassing enthusiasm), Muffin wallopers (scandalmongers, presumably because they enjoyed their salacious gossip with some delicious baked goods), and Gigglemug (simpering). 

The whole thing is, to borrow another entry from Ware’s dictionary, Nanty narking (great fun); it palpitates with actuality (reflects life with all its variety); it is veritably some pumpkins (the delightful opposite of “small potatoes”) — and it’s a fantastic cure for a nasty case of the morbs.

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I read somewhere that a good way to get more subscribers for your newsletter is to start a beef with someone who’s more established in the same field, so I’d like to open this one by firing off a few potshots at the 19th century Danish linguist Jens Otto Harry Jespersen. I hope one of the hospitals in the Central Jutland Region of Denmark has a top-shelf Burn Center, Otto, because you’re about to get scorched. 

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My primary gripe with Jespersen has to do with his habit of coining fancy words for the linguistic phenomena he unearthed, such as prosiopesis, for the tendency to omit the first sound in a word or phrase, as in “’Morning” for “Good Morning.” It’s thanks to old Otto that we’re stuck with the blisteringly dull word metanalysis for the extremely fun process that gives us real-ass words out of hilarious misunderstandings. As Otto puts it (in “A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles”):

I have ventured to coin the word ‘metanalysis’ for the phenomenon frequent in all languages that words or word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word ends, and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and what to the ending of a word, etc. In most cases he will arrive at the same analysis as the former generation, but now and then he will put the boundaries in another place than formerly, and the new analysis may become general.

The most well-known form of metanalysis happens when people naturally split a pair of words in the wrong place, as when we invented the apron out of whole cloth (as it were) due to a mishearing of “a napron” as “an apron.” (“Napron” is from the same Old French word that gives us “napkin.”) The word umpire comes from a similar misconstrual — hearing “an umpire” instead of “a nompere” (formed from “non” and “par” and meaning “not even,” i.e., a third, “odd,” party to judge a match between two competitors). This is also how we get “adder,” which was originally “nadder” (a Germanic word for a snake) and “auger” (the carpentry tool), a mishearing of “a nauger,” which is related to the word navel (as in belly button) in a fairly interesting way that I will just link to because I’m starting to worry that this sentence might collapse under its own weight. 

A slightly more complex metanalysis has given us the phrase “Eating humble pie,” which began life as a misunderstanding of “a numble” as “an umble” and then acquired a parasite “h” by mistaken association with the existing “humble” (which was at the time pronounced without it). Numbles (and later, umbles) — from the same root that gives us “loin” and “lumbar” (as in “lumbar region”) — was a word meaning “offal.” Apart from the coincidence of sound, it has no relation at all to “humble,” which comes from a root meaning “earth” that gives us all sorts of interesting words including “human” (an earthling) “chameleon” (an “earth lion”) and “bridegroom” (thanks to another hilarious misunderstanding). 

But so anyway, “eating humble pie” — aka, begging for forgiveness — is only actually humbling in the sense that one could imagine eating much more self-aggrandizing pies than the ones that are filled with minced entrails, though I’ve found that this is rather an unpopular fact to raise mid-apology, as it were. 

Speaking of apologies, we all owe one to our friend the eft, whom we’ve all been calling “a newt” instead of “an eft” (or “an eute”) since the middle of the 15th century, which is such a long time to have been calling someone by the wrong name that even the folks at Starbucks would be impressed. 

And speaking of names, “nickname” comes to us via a mishearing of “an eke-name.” (“Eke” is a Middle English word meaning “also,” which must have led to a good deal of confusion any time a Medieval cleaning lady was surprised by a mouse.) 

Not all metanalysis is a result of confounding “a” with “an” (or vice versa) — we have a similar process to thank for “surround,” which acquired its second “r” due to a false association with “round,” though its real origin is in the French word sur-onder (“to flow over,” from the Latin super (“over”) + undare “to flow,” which also gives us “undulate” and “inundate”). “Pea” is a singular falsely derived from “pease,” which was both singular and plural; and “cherry” is another false singular that owes its existence to a misunderstanding of the French “cerise” as a plural. And there are plenty more! “Notch,” “ingot,” “omelet,” “aught,” and (scandalously) “orange” all owe their origins to a form of metanalysis. 

But all of this is beside the point — which is to give old J. Otto Jespersen such a spectacular bollocking that he chucks his Liddell-Scott and his Cassel’s in the Gudenå and gives up the language game for good! Others have tried to make up for the extraordinary botch-up job Otto did when he came up with the world-beatingly bland “metanalysis,” but they haven’t done much better: calling these marvelous mishaps “faulty separations,” “misdivisions, “juncture losses,” or “rebracketings” is hardly an improvement. 

I’m open to bold suggestions here, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to seven (if I may say so) excellent choices: Nipnames, Pare Words, Choppelations, Phoney-mes, Dicey-slicies, Whoopsie-groups, and my current favorite, Splittybits. I shall await the new, revised, and dramatically improved edition of  “A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles” with bated breath.

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I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a distant past living tourist lives in the host homes they have somehow carved out of our alien present. These are the “fossil words,” obsolete and active all at once; common as dirt, but strange to the touch. If you saw one out alone at night, you’d recognize it as an interloper right away — they often wear their unbelonging openly — words like “wend,” “knell,” “druthers,” “eke,” and “dudgeon.” But they are adept at hiding in plain sight: “Wend your way.” “Death knell.” “If I had my druthers.” “Eke out a living.” “A state of high dudgeon.” And some are even better hidden, revealing their antediluvian sensibility only on close inspection — “point” in “in point of fact;” “needs” in “must needs;” “the” in “nonetheless,” “step” in “stepson.” 

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A rather marvelous but mostly forgotten 1901 book called Words & Their Ways in English Speech by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge is (as far as I can tell) the earliest text to describe these remarkable anachronisms as “fossils”: 

Thus it often happens that a word which was one of a thousand, or a form which was universal, becomes isolated. Dissociated from its fellows, it ceases to share their future destiny. If they perish, it does not perish with them. Nor is its preservation assisted by their survival. It may become the centre of a new group. Or it may remain isolated, — embedded, as it were, in amber, and lost or preserved to future ages, not as one of the swarm but with the individuality of a fossil.

Some of the fossils the authors single out (such as “whilom”) have themselves mostly vanished from the language since the book was published, but many more are still with us: “Umbrage,” for instance, which is never seen outside of the phrase “to take umbrage at,” is a word that literally means “shade” or “shadow” (as in umbrella), and someone takes umbrage at something (presumably) because it has cast a shadow on them (a converse of the more contemporary “throwing shade.”) “Dudgeon,” similarly, can’t walk on its own two feet outside of the phrase “High dudgeon.” Greenough and Kittredge speculate that it could be related to an earlier dudgeon that referred to the wood used to make knife handles, but most other sources are skeptical of this. In fact, it may have its roots in the Italian aduggiare, “to overshadow,” which would make it, rather satisfyingly, a cousin to umbrage. 

Armed with the concept of “fossil words,” you can start to see them everywhere: The “Pale” that only exists in “Beyond the Pale” is unrelated to the “Pale” that means “colorless” — it’s an otherwise obsolete word from the Latin palus, meaning “stake” and, by extension, “boundary.” The “Dint” that can nevermore escape from the phrase “By dint of” was once a mighty sword strike — the Old English dynt means “a blow from a weapon.” “Offing,” a nautical term for the open sea as it’s seen from the shore, now survives only in “In the offing,” which itself probably only survives because it was a favorite phrase of Bertie Wooster. Neither “Spick” nor “Span” are ever seen outside of the phrase “Spick and span,” which is a truncation of an older idiom, “Spick and span-new,” meaning something like “new as a freshly shaved chip” (a span was a chip, and a spick was probably the spike that shaved it). 

And “Shebang,” which was (somewhat mysteriously) Civil War slang for “a tavern,” now never leaves the safe confines of “The whole shebang,” where it means something like “business.” In an 1869 letter to his publishers, Mark Twain rather impressively managed to get “Shebang” and another soon-to-be fossil word into one sentence: 

“I like the book, I like you and your style and your business vim, and believe the chebang will be a success.”

“Vim” of course has since been almost entirely confined to the phrase “Vim and vigor,” but it briefly had a life of its own as a 19th century word that may have been a coinage from the Latin vis, which means “strength,” or may just have been something people like Mark Twain said because they liked the sound of it. 

There are enough of these that I don’t have space to set them all to rights here, but once you start noticing them, they really do pop out at you everywhere. There’s “Wend” (the original present tense of “went”) in “Wend your way;”  “Bated” (a truncation of “abated”) in “Bated breath;” “Kith” (a relative of the word “know”) in “Kith and kin;” and dozens more: “Loggerheads,” “Riddance,” “Fettle,” “Eke,” “Bandy,” “Petard.” I’ll just end, because I teased it earlier, with the (to my mind) astonishing “Step” in “stepchild.” Unlike the “Step” that means “moving a foot forward” and comes from the Old English steppan, the “Step-” in “Stepchild” is the last remaining vestige in English of a word that meant “bereaved.” As Greenough and Kittredge explain:

The step- in stepson and the like is the adjective stēop, ‘destitute,’ ‘bereaved,’ so that stepson or stepchild is the same as orphan, which comes from the Greek for ‘bereaved.’ Stepfather and stepmother are therefore terms which could only have arisen after the step- had lost its proper sense. A stepmother is not a ‘bereaved mother,’ but one who takes the place of a mother to the bereaved children. This illustrates the tendency of language to form groups, and to make new words to fill out any gaps that may be observed in any group.

Which is to say that not only have these charming little time travelers made homes of their own in the language, some of them are starting families. 

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I have made you a themed puzzle. The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in with a click! 

Those of us who aspire to a quiet life know that (in polite company) we should never raise the topics of politics, religion, or whether it’s advisable to deploy an extraneous comma before “and” or “or” in a series of three or more terms. The question of the Serial Comma—known to pedants as the “Oxford Comma,” and to delusional Harvard pedants as the “Harvard Comma”—has been the source of more enthusiastic bomb-throwing amongst the grammatically inclined than almost any other topic (with the possible exception of what-all we ought to be doing w/r/t “irregardless”). 

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In 1940, the journal American Speech surveyed the state of the Oxford Comma Wars in an article entitled “The Serial Comma before ‘And’ and ‘Or’,” by R. J. McCutcheon, who—even then—was aware of the passions inflamed by his topic. 

The rule of punctuation calling for a comma before and or or joining the last two members of a series, may seem the most unimportant subject in the world but I have found such strong opinions for and against its application that I am presenting some of my findings.

McCutcheon’s article—which surveys various newspaper copy desks for their opinions on the matter—contains an early example of the argument favored by opponents of the Serial Comma (let’s call them Serial Killers) that “and” and “or” essentially are commas, rendering the Serial Comma not just gratuitous, but redundant. Says one committed Serial Killer:

‘It has been found that much of the nicely logical but "fussy" punctuation developed by the more pedantic is not necessary to clearness, and as a result the modern newspaper gets along very well with about half the volume of points used in book composition.’

You can almost hear the strenuous clacking of the typewriter and the grinding teeth behind the thin-lipped smile in this response, which is doubly amusing when it’s weighed against a politely opposite viewpoint from someone on the other side of the copy desk:

So far as the editorial pages of The Sun and The Evening Sun are concerned, there is considerably more latitude in matters of punctuation, but the latitude doesn't seem to extend far enough to include this particular rule. I can recall, now that I think of it, occasions on which I wanted very much to use a comma between C and D, and had to spend most of the day struggling with compositors, proof readers and various other people in order to get my way.

The Serial Comma has been used in English writing since the Renaissance, but its discovery (as it were)—and its emergence as the “Oxford Comma”—are generally attributed to the British indexer F. H. Collins, with an assist from the philosopher Herbert Spencer (who also, incidentally, coined the term “survival of the fittest,” which, I dunno … what a legacy!). Collins’s influential usage guide, Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary, was published by the Oxford University Press (hence “Oxford Comma”) in 1905, and cited Spencer in its justification for the extra bit of punctuation: 

The late Herbert Spencer allowed me to quote from his letter : — “ whether to write ‘black, white, and green,’ with the comma after white, or to leave out the comma and write 'black, white and green’ — I very positively decide in favour of the first. To me the comma is of value as marking out the component elements of a thought, and where any set of components of a thought are of equal value, they should be punctuated in printing and in speech equally: Evidently therefore in this case, inasmuch as when enumerating these colours black, white, and green, the white is just as much to be emphasized as the other two, it needs the pause after it just as much as the black does.”

More than a hundred years after Spencer’s thoughtful advocacy for the Serial Comma, a poll run by FiveThirtyEight and SurveyMonkey found that 57 percent of respondents agreed with him, compared to 43 percent who preferred to do without it. The argument most commonly cited by modern Spencerites is that a Serial Comma avoids the ambiguity that occurs in the following (frankly unhinged) book dedication: 

“To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” 

But the Serial Killers are quick to point out that you can achieve an equally vexing ambiguity with the following dedication:

“To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.” 

In both cases, the initial comma can be misread as introducing an appositive rather than preceding a new item in the series, leading readers to think the author is claiming to have been raised by Ayn Rand, who—in point of fact—preferred writing some of the world’s heaviest books to the subtle joys and trials of parenthood. 

To press the Serial Killer position a bit further, there’s an argument to be made that if the goal is to use punctuation only when it’s necessary to support meaning, one ought to proceed from the position of doing without the extra comma and either using it in the rare events where clarification is needed, or simply rearranging the sentence to do away with any ambiguity: To God, Ayn Rand and my parents. (This line of reasoning would also protect the SKs from having to defend their philosophy vis à vis the multimillion dollar 2014 lawsuit that hung on the lack of a Serial Comma in the phrase “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of [agricultural products].”)

But this line of attack doesn’t answer Spencer’s original point about the Serial Comma, which is about weight and rhythm in a sentence. Those of us who are particularly prone to subvocalization when reading will notice that a comma suggests a rhythmic pause that an “and” does not—something that’s particularly apparent when you’re faced with a series that itself contains a subordinate series, as in:

When deciding on an appropriate dedication for your book, it’s always best to confine yourself to one of the five following options: your cat, your parents, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, Ayn Rand and God, or your loving partner.

I find that I mentally tap the brakes after each comma in the series, but not before a comma-less “and,” which is good and proper in this case, but jarring when the “and” is supposed to be doing the same job as the commas in the series. As Spencer says, “when enumerating these colours black, white, and green, the white is just as much to be emphasized as the other two, it needs the pause after it just as much as the black does.” 

Although it’s not really an argument pro or con, the Oxford Comma does have one more extremely unlikely ally in the form of R. M. Bevensee, an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Berkeley, who wrote the actual dedication that (presumably) inspired the apocryphal “Ayn Rand” examples. His 1964 book Electromagnetic Slow Wave Systems begins with a series of three terms, each set off with a comma, including after the penultimate item in the series and before the coordinating conjunction (aka, a classic Serial Comma): “This Book is Dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, and the glory of GOD.” 

I’m not entirely sure where that leaves us in the Oxford Comma Wars. But hopefully we can all at least agree that the arsonists who insist on two spaces after a period should be drummed out of society and abandoned on an island to contemplate their crimes for eternity. 

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