CLARA BOW
The It Girl applied her red lipstick in the shape of a heart. Women who imitated this shape were said to be putting a “Clara Bow” on their mouths.
iMDb Trivia
**
Borborygmus
The sound of a stomach rumbling
Everyone has experienced borborygmus. This technical-sounding word is perhaps a more polite description for what you might call “tummy rumbles.” Let’s just hope your next borborygmus doesn’t lead to collywobbles.
WORD SMARTS (April 12, 2025)
**
KANGAROO WORDS
Kangaroo word, n. a word that has a similar word hidden inside it, e.g. BLOssOM. So called for obvious reasons.
**
JAWN
“The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places,individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”
Source: ATLAS OBSCURA website
**
“Kissing the shuttle” is the term for a process by which weavers used their mouths to pull thread through the eye of a shuttle when the pirn was replaced.”
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Kissing_the_shuttle
**
6 LETTER MAGIC SQUARE
AS S E R T
S EA L E R
S AL I V A
E LI D E D
REV E R E
TRA D E R
from Ripley’s Believe It or Not 7h series (NY: Pocket Books, 1972)
**
RETRONYM
“Snail mail as it has been popularized is an example of a retronym, a word coined to describe something when a new format takes over the former meaning. Before electric guitars became popular, what was earlier simply a guitar had to be called an acoustic guitar. With the popularity of ebooks and audiobooks, now sometimes we have to explicitly specify paper books.”
ANU GARG. Wordsmith (May 6, 2024)
**
COCKSHY
It comes from the verb to shy, meaning to throw. The general term is cockshy, meaning a throw at a thing, originally a cock, for amusement, or the object set up to be thrown at. So, a coconut shy is a cockshy set up with a coconut to be thrown at or as the prize.”
Bruce Newling
**
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON
We all know that this phrase is used to describe events that happen very rarely. But what is a “Blue Moon”? Nowadays, we use the term to refer to the second full moon that we can see within a calendar month. Since moon cycles last about 29.5 days and months last around 30, it is unusual for a month to include two full moons. According to NASA, this phenomenon occurs once every two to three years.
The line was first used metaphorically in 1821, in Pierce Egan’s play called Real Life in London. However, this first use might have been referring to the more literal phenomenon of the moon appearing visibly blue because of atmospheric events, like fires or volcanic emissions.
Dictionary Scoop (January 19, 2026)
]**
THE GISH GALLOP
“This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.”
Heather Cox Richardson -June 28,2024
**
GLASGOW SMILE
The Black Dahlia murderer mutilated Elizabeth Short before leaving her remains in a Los Angeles park in 1947. The wounds that would come to symbolize the case were two cuts connecting her ears to the corners of her mouth, giving her the appearance of a perpetual grin. Dubbed a Glasgow Smile because of its prevalent use among Scottish gangs in the 1920s and ’30s, this mark has appeared in numerous murder cases since.
from https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/561752/killer-words-every-true-crime-buff-should-know
**
“Some English words are only still in use because of their length — their original usages are long outdated — such as the 28-letter word “antidisestablishmentarianism.” This noun originally meant “opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England,” but today, it’s almost exclusively used just as an example of one of the longest English words.”
WORD GENIUS SITE (SEPTEMBER 4, 2023)
**
About Holus-Bolus
“Holus-bolus” possibly originated as a pseudo-Latin rhyme based on the phrase “whole bolus” (“all at once”), but might also come from the Greek phrase “hólos bôlos” (“clump of earth”).
WORD GENIUS (MARCH 15, 2022)
**
RHYMED ENDS
Bouts-rimés (“rhymed ends” in French) is a poetic exercise where one picks rhyming words in a given order, and someone else composes poetry with the selected words at the end of each line.
The idea is to pick some unlikely rhymes to make it challenging for the poet. But this seems to relate a book of rhymes, which songwriters and especially rappers use to make composition easier, not harder. I might revisit this topic in the not-too-distant future.
A caconym is an unattractive name, whether a rude nickname like calling a cat a “mousefarter” or just a primary name, as in the best sentence C.S. Lewis ever wrote:
There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
T.Campbell. August 28, 2025
*
CRAZY EIGHTS BY LOUIS PHILLIPS
P
TRAM OLINE
**
INV SBLE
**
EQ UAL = Separate but equal
**
SEPE RATE
**
caMel giraffes
HOLE ZER0
this e.g. - crazy eights
PhillipsMiscellany 
Lou, As usual, these are great; as usual, I couldn’t post the following when I tried to comment via the link: You brought back memories of my father teaching me to spell antidisestablishmentarianism (herein completed by AI) and the pride he took when I’d mastered it. As always Nelson
LikeLike