Zazzing Up the Ubercross small z
Plus updates and corrections...to non-Ubercross things.
I do miss things! In the last 24 hours, I’ve gotten a couple of points of feedback worth mentioning here:
When I ran my piece on word lipograms, first on this Substack and later in The Journal of Wordplay, I neglected to mention Anil’s article for issue #1 of the Journal, which is, as far as I know, the first usage of the term. (Searching for “word lipograms” pulls up a lot of results, but most of them are for the word “lipograms.”) I’m adjusting this in the archives and tweaking the downloadable PDF accordingly.
That caveat “as far as I know” comes up so often in my research, I’ve thought about doing a column called “AFAIK.” Yesterday I said that as far as I knew, Word Ways hadn’t found an improper word that used only the top row of the keyboard and was more than 12 letters long, and I suggested the 13-letter teetertottery. My searches of the Word Ways database suggested it hadn’t touched this idea since 2005.
It turns out there was a 15-letter suggestion from Jeff Grant in the August 2015 Word Ways: prototypewriter. Parse it as proto-typewriter, not prototype-writer. While this word, like teetertottery, is not found in most dictionaries, it does appear in the wild here, here, and here, referring to a nineteenth-century device that worked kind of like modern typewriters and keyboards, but not quite. No such luck for prototypewritery, though! That’s just a bridge too far.
So, as far as I know now, prototypewriter is the longest English word in any kind of use that uses only the top row of a QWERTYUIOP keyboard. We’ll see if Jeff’s record holds up! Thanks to Tyler M for the catch.
And now, it’s…it’s the last of the “lower case” Ubercrosses! How can this have happened so soon? Anyway, here’s the link.
Enjoy!
