"Each word, each glance, each thought is a centaur, or a hand-headed owl, a grammar-horned deer." —the artists' statement for An Encyclopedia of Everything: Paperworks

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

You've heard of the "less is more" philosophy, but in the song about "one less bell to answer, one less egg to fry, one less man to pick up after," less is fewer.

"Printed without a title."  Technically, that is the title of Garcia: a Tragedy by Frederick Guest Tomlins, 1835.

From Moving Picture Age (1920).

In the song "A Little Bird Told Me," Ken Clinger takes a CLICHÉ and (anagrammatically speaking) offers CHICLE for listeners to chew on.  Anagrammatically furthermore, he transforms the OVERUSED into a SURE DOVE.  He salvages INLAID OUTPUTS from the PLATITUDINOUS.  The TIMEWORN has MERIT NOW.  Clinger's song blows out of the water our previously favorite lyrics woven from clichés, Thompson Twin's "Still Waters."

You've seen Johan Deckmann's Smart Ways to Use Poetry in a Street Fight.  Though only the book's cover has survived, we speculated that (if the physicists are right about multiple universes) there's some world in which the book's pages exist.  Through the powers of several arcane tools at our disposal, we were able to purloin five fragments.  We present them here, exclusively.  The first is an advertisement from the book's front matter, for a Lord Byron-branded boxing glove "used in every important poetic convention."  (The ad notes that "unprotected figures" are "protected by hyperbole.")  The second fragment instructs on how to deal with "a cowardly poet of society" by throwing him on his face.  The third recommends grabbing the "pencil-hand" and using an enjambment to incapacitate any "poetaster" who has whipped out a synecdoche.  The fourth involves using a powerful blank verse to leave someone curled in a ball, or an epigram to slash a bone in two.  The final fragment addresses how difficult it is for an idle rhymer to train and offers a tip for the writing desk.  (The book was, of course, second-hand, and the red markings on the pages are as we found them.)

Here's an all-consonant phrase from on-high, courtesy of The Hero Yoshihiko and the Key of the Evil Spirits (Yuusha Yoshihiko to Akuryou no Kagi, 勇者ヨシヒコと悪霊の鍵).  The ravenous Buddha is played by comedian Sato Jiro.  His characterization is of a trickster, and while the phrase "trickster buddha" delivers very few search results, there is at least one journal article about Buddha as a trickster.

We're honored that our controversial "pop" take on occult language, in Magic Words: A Dictionary (Weiser Books), proved influential to the writers of the TV series Kamen Rider Wizard when they sought catchy English phrases to work into their scripts.  In that show, the magician hero uses playful pop-culture-derived words like "shabadoobie" to trigger transformations.  Though we have been lauded for being the first reference of magic to analyze mystical phrases from pop lyrics, comic books, TV shows, movies, and pulp fiction, our approach is yet something of a hot potato.  Claude Lecouteux's Dictionary of Ancient Magic Words and Spells directly takes on our own dictionary, claiming that while the Harry Potter series has popularized magic words, "novels, films, and comic books can provide only a simplified, distorted version of them."  You'll have already detected a philosophical division that can be likened to the "lesser and greater vehicles" of Buddhism's Hinayana and Mahayana schools.  The "greater vehicle" (our own) allows for the recognition of magic words in all sorts of sources and contexts, while the "lesser vehicle" (Lecouteux's) pooh-pooh's language not scrawled on ancient scrolls.  (Here's a secret that the Buddhists eventually came to realize: both vehicles get to the same place.  Lecouteux, bless him, doesn't seem privy to that insight.  But no matter, as words of power march on, oblivious and impervious to the footnotes scholars try to pin on them.)

This unusual typewriter keyboard layout offered a way to take dictation from a dictatorial dictator.  John Savard tells us that "in 1937, Portugal's dictator Antonio Salazar decreed the use [of this keyboard]."  

"Sound the hugag!  Strike the hurdy gurdy!!  Proclaim it from the house tops!"  The word hugag here is a variant spelling of hewgag, a bugle-like instrument.  (Other variants include gewgaw and gugag.)  The word can also mean something for which one has no specific name (as per Cassell's Dictionary of Slang).  From an ad for A. Kirschbaum, confectioner, Pittsburg, Texas, c. 1880.

Can it be true that there's a "curse of one-letter words," as per this commentary piece by Michael Carley?  We can now affirm that there is, indeed, a curse of one-letter words.  We were victimized by it when the Barnes & Noble book chain refused to stock our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, published by HarperCollins.  Our book is now out of print, except on Kindle, but if you encounter a hardcover copy somewhere in the world, we can assure you of one thing: though there is a curse of one-letter words, our dictionary does not constitute a demonic bible or otherwise forbidden reference.

"Profanity," from Character Sketches, or The Blackboard Mirror by George A. Lofton, 1890.

"Every language is bittersweet to those who don't know it." —Gary Barwin, Yiddish for Pirates

"Our proper bliss depends on what [that which] we blame."  From A Practical Grammar by Stephen Watkins Clark, 1847.

Our favorite month — Februgesy!  From Education, Personality & Crime by Albert Wilson, 1908.