The Right Word

To this day, there are fewer than 50 Google results for the word "phototures."  From Rockingham's 1970 yearbook.

"It was a boojum."  From The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll and illustrated Henry Holiday, 1876.

We're pleased that our Magic Words: A Dictionary is referenced in Ancient Origins' post about the origins of "abracadabra."

Oh!  From Jungle Night by William Beebe, 1918.

Not a strange unit of measure, the "Ounce" is, of course, another name for a snow leopard.  From Tales About Animals by Peter Parley, 1870.

What words make you want to die?  Here's one, in an entry from The Dictionary of Ugly Words, a book attributed to us.

We're often asked, "is it teepee or tepee?"  You'll see tepee everywhere, but "popularity is only of temporary moment ... a vulgar struggling for supremacy" (Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, 1849).  Indeed, California's Wigwam Motel (on both the historic registry and alongside the ghostly vestiges of Route 66) spells it teepee.  That's surely definitive.  For further proof, we offer our own graphical evidence (heehee).

One Punchinello, two or more Puns-chinello.  From Le Journal Amusant, 1903.

A design idea for greeting cards: crisscrossing four quotations with a key word at the center.  From The Gospel Woman, 1881

Here's a trick for spelling Constantinople:

It's a C and an I and a constanti, and a steeple and a stople and a constantinople.

—Rupert Hughes, Gift Wife, 1910

These are text scanning errors: in each case, the word apocrypha appeared as a page or column heading but got attached to first words on the page or the final words of the previous page, creating a new sentence that exists only in the context of a Google search result.

 In the Mota language of the Vanuatu archipelago, a tamate-tiqa is a "ghost-shooter," a tube of bamboo stuffed with magic and shot off against the person whom it is desired to injure.  From A Dictionary of the Language of Mota, Sugarloaf Island, Banks' Islands by Codrington and Palmer, 1896

Foiled by a line of dots, just as the romantic action was heating up.  From La Charrette Charrie, 1923.

Can “slew” be pluralized?  Only if there are myriads.

Here's a recipe book written by someone whose name appropriately sounds like fireplace grates for heating pans.  One Hundred and Sixty Culinary Dainties for the Epicure, the Invalid and the Dyspeptic by Samuel Hobbs, 1885.  See Nostradamus Predicted Your Next Diet.

Here's a list of excuses from The Cap and Gown yearbook of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1904.

Today we call them "paranormal investigators," "ghost hunters," or Ghostbusters, but in the early 1900s they were known as "ghost breakers."  Our image is from the title page to The Ghost Breaker by Charles Williams Goddard & Paul Dickey, 1915.