The Last Words

And MORE words, about THOSE words!

Dmitri Borgmann’s “My Last Words” covered the last words in each letter heading of the dictionary. Since some decades have passed since he came up with it, I thought I’d see what the last words would be in dictionaries today.

Compared to Borgmann’s era, we’re drowning in possibility: there are many resources to find words, not all of them reputable. (Defund Urban Dictionary!) I was also unkind to “variant spellings” that just looked like bad spellings to my eye. Plus most initialisms, simple surnames, and place names… and even character names, despite one of my favorite film characters being a candidate…

Sorry, Yzma. But see? I snuck you into the margins!

An azzy is a “wayward child,” as it was in Borgmann’s day. Unlike in Borgmann’s day, the word now recalls the YouTuber of the same name.

The bzzzt sound effect means “Wrong!” or maybe “Wrong-o, buster!”

Tea lovers may call it czystek, though it’s also called cistus or rock rose.

The letter Ԫ in Cyrillic is westernized as dzzhe.

Ezrin is the protein linking a cell’s membrane to its cytoskeleton.

The Anglo-Saxon term fyrdung means the whole potential military force of a nation. (Don’t bring back the draft.)

The Gzhelian is a geologic age, the last such age of the Carboniferous period, which was the last period of the Paleozoic era. But you can still use it to mean “really really old.”

You know how ozone is three oxygen atoms together? Well, hyzone is that but for hydrogen. It’s not very stable.

We’ve gotten this far without including much slang. That isn’t too unusual, izzit?

Jyutping is a system to Romanize Cantonese (see example)

(By Wikifresc - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77180551.)

Kyzylkumite is a mineral. Lyxulose is a sugar.

Mzungu is an African term for (white) “outsider” that some whites have embraced.

Nyxis is medical piercing with a needle.

Ozzie is a term for Australian that most Ozzies/Aussies embrace.

If I tell Janice about pyzy, Polish potato dumplings often filled with meat or cheese, we’ll probably end up eating some by the end of the week.

You won’t believe what the last q-word in the dictionary is!

Ryvita is a kind of bread.

Szybalski's rule is something you only have to know if you’re a microbiologist.

Observant Jews may wear tzitzis, knotted fringes or tassels on the corners of their garments.

Junji Ito’s horror manga Uzumaki, adapted to anime, was inspired in part by the spiral appearance of uzumaki mochi, a Japanese snack.

Vyvanse is an ADHD medication. If I’d taken it, I wouldn’t be doing things like this, probably.

A wyvern is a mythical, two-legged, winged dragon with a pointed tail.

The word xyzzy is used as a placeholder like thus-and-so or such-and-such. It’s “the word for when you can’t think of the word”!

I excluded most initialisms because they weren’t familiar to our everyday life, but most people have dealt with the YYYY-MM-DD format for entering dates.

Time for sleep! Borgmann found a dictionary that included zzzz, but these days zzz seems like the standard sleep signifier. It has a plural, though. You can catch zzzs.

Still playing catchup a bit, on both writing and correspondence, and when I do write lately, it runs longer than I planned. I’ll show the astronaut palindromes at a later date. Tomorrow, though, I want to keep the “Sunday comics” tradition going with a story about the team that could have changed superhero comics as we know them. Till then!