Thanks to the New Straits Times for recommending our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary and noting that it features "More than 1,000 surprising — and revealing — definitions of each singular letter in the English alphabet; everything from 'a per se' to 'a hypothetical explosive.'"

Is There an "X" in "Especially"?

(our guest post for The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar)

Jeff Stone is perfectly correct in colorfully noting that "there's no freakin' X in the word 'especially.'"  Yet we can't help fondly remembering those centuries when the word "expecial" meant "singular" or "exceptional," as in the context of accessories designed "to meet the expecial needs of the physician" (Brooklyn Medical Journal, Vol. 8, 1894) or European colonists in the Potomac being advised not to expose themselves to the danger of the Tuscarora War of 1711 "without expecial necessity" (James Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 2009). 

Our favorite context for the word "expecial" is, of course, the world of algebra!  Back in 1919, a textbook entitled First Course in Algebra embodied "an expecial effort to connect the elements of algebra in a clear and forcible manner with the affairs of every-day life."  If any field is qualified to put an X in "especially," it's algebra!

"Any word can be the right word, if used in the right place."
—X. J. Kennedy, An Introduction to Poetry

Thanks to Beth Ritter-Guth for praising our Strange and Unusual References site for offering facts not found on any other site, for offering free e-books, and for aiming to teach as well as to entertain.  See her full discussion here.

Thanks to Lists Galore for pointing to our friend Jonathan's wacky birthday form.

Thanks to Vani Hegde for blogging her favorite one-letter words from our dictionary!

We're delighted to have our research on the letter X referenced in Marcel Danesi's X-Rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture.

From our Magic Words outpost at Blogger:

We just discovered (with help from Gordon) that a Mac app called Presto contains a passage from our Magic Words: A Dictionary. Presto is a utility for quickly pasting in commonly used snippets of text, and the magic word "presto" is the default example. So when one types "presto" into any application, a passage from our dictionary appears, like magic!

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"[W]here are the words to describe the glorious colours that are unknown to earthly eyes? Where the mind or imagination that can grasp the gorgeous scintillations of unheard-of rays as they emanate from the thousand nameless jewels of Barsoom?"
—Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Gods of Mars, 1918
(via DJMisc)

"All those things for which we have no words are lost.  The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel.  With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work.  With these we try to save our very lives." —Annie Dillard

I have worn certain letters off my keyboard.
"M" and "N" vanished together (aMNesia?)
V is half there? (My half-cocked loVe?)
—William Keckler

Unnecessary Attribution
(of brief, public-domain utterances)

by literary rapscallion Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

Prof. Oddfellow adds:
Gary Barwin adds:

As God said, ". . ."

Here's a nest of intriguing bird words from natural(ist) humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.

Here's a delightful list of "supernatural collective nouns" (thanks Wilfried!)

... an                         of invisible spirits.

The blogger at Grammar Tales recently encountered our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary at the University of Toronto library: "My first thought was that this must be a very short book."

Speaking of One-Letter Words, we hear that our dictionary is going out of print, so be sure to snag your copy ASAP!

Thanks to the Bananagrammer blog for recommending our Wye's Dictionary of Improbable Words to those "interested in obscure words on the extremes of human language."  We love how Bananagrammer says that our collections of all-consonant and all-vowel words "spin off into highly arcane references (at times approaching Borges-level bizarreness)."

"Writers don’t have to be brilliant conversationalists; it’s not their job to be smart except, of course, when they write. Hazlitt, that most self-conscious of writers, remarked that he did not see why an author 'is bound to talk, any more than he is bound to dance, or ride, or fence better than other people. Reading, study, silence, thought are a bad introduction to loquacity.'" —Arthur Krystal, "When Writers Speak," Sunday Book Review