The Right Word

Lines Tend to Want Words

"Use number 2 pencils. Get a good pencil sharpener and sharpen about twenty pencils. When one is dull, grab another. . . .
Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white paper seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page? The lines tend to want words. Blank paper begs to be left alone. The best notebooks I’ve found are National 43-581."

—Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, 1979.

via DJMisc

Lively Emptings: "The yeast sediment in the bottom of a beer barrel.  Used in place of eggs in some recipes."

(From Chef2Chef.net, via Jonathan.)

A gossip report quoted a source who "sounds like a teenage girl when she breathlessly relates (with all kinds of implied exclamation points and italic) that" so-and-so is inseparable from so-and-so.  As if the idea of an "implied exclamation point" weren't delicious enough, there's mention of "all kinds" of implied exclamation points!  My inner eye is feasting over an entire chart of implied explanation points, each variety clearly distinguished!  As there was also mention of implied italic, perhaps each kind of implied exclamation point has an oblique variant.

Luke Metcalfe, creator of a charming online anagram dictionary, suggests that "to some small degree we've been subconsciously shaping our language to make nice anagrams."  He is referring to the huge number of anagrams that are surprisingly fitting, such as: eternity and entirety, backward and drawback, discern and rescind, demand and madden, comedian and demoniac, American and cinerama, aspirate and parasite, oldies and soiled, lust and slut.

My site for all strange and unusual references (great and small) has undergone a major redesign.  Spread the words!

Here's a kiss and hug (X and O, in the shorthand of love notes), by way of the  One Letter Words Quiz Deck by Pomegranate. 

Fun with quotation marks:

Capital "A" and "Capital A" mean two different things in the context of this old architecture diagram.  To learn the surprising answer, see my guest blog at the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An ounce of ______ is worth a pound of ______.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar spotlighted Hamilton, the only city in the United States to legally have an exclamation mark attached to its name.  The scalawags at SPOGG suggested adding a question mark after Newark.  Here are my own punctuation-city suggestions:

• Boston— (that's a long dash, in honor of the marathon)
• {Las Vegas} (with braces, because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas)
• Colonial. Williamsburg ("Colonial period Williamsburg")
• &over, MA
  

I just got an e-mail from an author in the Netherlands who is completing his Dutch dictionary of one-letter words.  Stage Two of the Global Initiative has begun!

Referring to the Dictionary of All-Consonant Words, Jonathan wrote:

The “a” word is “attitude.”  —Todd Phillips, “A Whole Lot of Finger Pointing,” Advanced  Manufacturing

"I wish there were one-letter words that weren't palindromes."
—James "Kibo" Parry

Speaking of palindromes, have you seen Mozart's Palindromic Duet?

Tauba Auerbach's "Listen/Silent" anagram reminds me of a poem by Thomas Moore:

I like the idea of teardrops being a magical potion, glistening with enchantment of a shadowy (mirthless) yet sacred nature.

"Q" is an "O" with a little "tail" leading out of the closed space inside of the "O."  So, "Q" symbolizes a closed space with a "way out." —W. C. Vetsch, Text.

It's time to reveal my greatest secret.  I'm commonly asked how I was able to find so many one-letter words.  The short answer is: gnomes!

The gnomes seen here frolicking around One-Letter Words: A Dictionary were recommended to me by Stephanie of Izile's Oddities.

An engineer and armchair philosopher named Joel created this terrific bar graph of one-letter words that appear in Google's 8-trillion page index.  "A" is the most common single letter on Google, followed by "e," "i," "o," and "s."  At first I was surprised that "v" appears more often than the vowel "u," but then I figured it must have to do with "v" appearing as a Roman numeral.

I like how the letter index goes all the way to 30, as if there are slots available for letters that only appear in leap years or something.

This is my all-time favorite quotation about one-letter words, probably because it encapsulates the concept of the microcosm:


The illustration of the letter "I" is by Tauba Auerbach, whose alphanumeric work is endlessly fascinating.

This is from Geof Huth's delightful "Analphabet" project.  See the full sized image here, and see the entire collection here.