Today’s the Ides of March, and since there aren’t any tyrants to depose in my country this year, I’m observing the coming spring by cleaning out my inbox. In so doing, I found a few notes I jotted to myself before The Journal of Wordplay even got started about words that struck me funny. Can you guess what I found unusual about these?
Def and fed - Aged and silvered - Ushers and smithery - Expediency - Threnodials - 1/4/10/12/15 - Oral and aural - Spoonfed and trinomially - Monopoly and wholesome
Def and fed are the longest common dictionary words that are also alphabetic sequences, forward and back. The name Stu also fits this label, but it’s a proper name.
Aged and silvered mean roughly the same thing if you’re alluding to someone’s hair going gray. Ag is the chemical symbol for silver.
Ushers is a small word with a lot of traditional pronouns hiding in it: us, she, he, her, hers. Smithery includes the letters of even more: I, he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its, me, my, they, them, their, theirs…and if you’re getting old-fashioned, thy and ye. I feel like neopronouns are too broad and unstandardized to work them into an exercise like this just yet, but we’ll see if that changes in a few more years.
Expediency is a gramogram because it sounds just like the letters XPDNC. Lots of other words are gramograms, like peony (PNE) and excellency (XLNC), but a five-letter example is rare. (I couldn’t say “unique” without more research than I’ve got time for today, but it seems to be the longest that's commonly cited.)
Threnodials is an uncommon variant on the already uncommon threnodies, meaning songs or poems of mourning. “Threnodial” is usually the adjective form, but it can mean “threnody-like thing,” and thus it can be pluralized. The main reason to go to all this trouble is that “threnodials” may be the only word that contains all the eleven most commonly used letters.
One is the number of numerals that it takes to represent the number 1. Four is the number of letters that it takes to spell out the number four. Ten is the number of Braille bumps in TEN (four in T, two in E, four in N). Twelve is the number of Scrabble points you get from the word TWELVE (1, 4, 1, 1, 4, 1). Fifteen is the number of Morse-code signs used to spell “fifteen” (..-. .. ..-. - . . -.).
Oral and aural are homophones or near-homophones, depending on where you’re from. One relates to speech and the other to hearing, which theoretically makes them opposites, but there’s a lot of overlap. For instance, you could say that since they sound alike, they have an oral…or aural…similarity.
Spoonfeed and trinomially are two of the biggest words in which the consonants are in reverse alphabetical order. “Trinomially” allows duplicate consonants while “spoonfeed” doesn’t. By another standard, “spoonfeed” is a long word in reverse alphabetical order, allowing duplicate vowels.
Monopoly comes from two roots, mono- and poly, which mean “one” and “many,” respectively. Wholesome comes from whole and some, and you can’t have just some if you take the whole thing! This kind of conflict between a word’s roots is called an etymological oxymoron. Weirdly, “oxymoron” itself is another example, since “oxy-” means “sharp, pointed” and “moron” means, well, moronic. Monopoly and wholesome are an especially tight pair because their parts are all related to counting words: “one,” “many,” “all,” “some.” Too bad that a wholesome monopoly is an oxymoron, too…
Alphabet chestnut at the diner:
FUNEX? SVFX. FUNEM? SVFM. LFMNX!