Wordwizard

P.S. Intonation doesn't matter.

"Counting" could be either the main verb (present participle) with the direct object "coups": They were counting coups after the raid; or a gerund (present participle used as a noun): The nominee celebrated his win in the primary by counting coups from distorting his opponents' records. ("Coups" is ...

After a recent state primary election, one radio host appropriately commented that some candidates had focused on the negatives of opponents' records. He used the term "counting coups." I couldn't find it in Webster's 11th Collegiate, and I haven't heard it in a long time. It should have been with "...

Hence my visit here :) Never realized there were other "wordies" out there, but it seems obvious to me now. I went to wikipedia to try to get a more precise defintion of ennui, since I have it. I was amazed that I was re-directed to boredom. I can tell you it's not boredom or depression as it's bei...

Hate to break it to you, cookie, but there was never a time when everyone in America said baby. The vast majority of Americans have NEVER said baby. In fact, most have never even eaten one. Erik, Is this a reference to Jonathan Swift's queasy satire (the title escapes me at the moment) on suggestin...

I was once an editor for a small newspaper. When the boss/publisher invited some potential investors to tour the facilities, he decided to spruce up the newsroom with name plates on our desks. There followed some discussion on what our titles would be as many of us had more than one job. The most di...

I checked a website called poemhunter.com, which was marginally helpful. It found only 1 Ogden Nash poem with the word "purple" but none with "burp'll." When I searched for that contraction by any poet, it brought up 1,000 instances of "'ll." ??? So I'm looking for a poem by someone else. I ran acro...

Thanks, Erik, you beat me to a reaction to the supposed list of rhymes. If a few common, final letter sounds qualified as rhymes, I'd have earned an A instead of a D- on my first -- and only -- attempt at writing a limerick, on Cyrano De Bergerac, in high school English. Cyrano was a man of words. H...

Buck Owens may have recorded it, but Roger Miller made it a hit.

Supposedly no word rhymes with "purple." Seems to me Ogden Nash wrote a poem that ends in "a burp'll." (a burp will).

Anybody have the rest of it?

English has the words "acreage," "mileage," "yardage," and "footage." I've been wondering, half seriously, if "inchage" has ever been coined to mean an aggregate or collection of or rate in inches. Does the metric system have comparable terms using specific units? "Meters per second," "grams per squ...

This topic has been rolling around in my brain for some time now, and I am glad to see it has for others. Three comments: - So many words, especially past tense verbs, that end in "-ed" lose that syllable, as in "pulled" = /puld/ or "talked" = /tokt/. Yet we have "naked," "crooked," and "ragged" tha...

A relative sent me this riddle. "This is going to make you so MAD! There are three words in the English language that end in "gry". ONE is angry and the other is hungry. EveryONE knows what the third ONE means and what it stands for. EveryONE uses them everyday, and if you listened very carefully, I...

Ken, although I join you in the Silent Generation, I don't necessarily agree that "apathy" on campus is a negative. The '50s were a great time to grow up. And when many college campuses in the '60s were erupting in sitdowns and takeovers and draft card burnings (by early Boomers), my church-affiliat...

The Baby Boomer generation began in January 1946. What is the name for the previous generation? There used to be the term "War Babies" but I don't know if that applies.