"By cock and pie and mousefoot."  From A Glossary Or Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, &c. Which Have Been Thought to Require Illustration in the Works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by Robert Nares, 1825

Here's the serpentine squiggle from Tristram Shandy, translated into French by Honoré de Balzac for inclusion in his novel La Peau de Chagrin and then converted back into English by Balzac's translator Ellen Marriage.  See our collection of this squiggle's transliterations here.

"Some words passed between us."  From 1906.

In Absolutely Fabulous (series 3, episode 3), students seek a name for a presentation.  They brainstorm "gen...etics ethics" and "gentics."  But we found the name they never landed on: genethliacal (as seen in Genethliacal Astrology Comprehending an Enquiry Into, and Defense of the Celestial Science by John Worsdale, 1798).

What's older than ancient?  The obsolete spelling: antient.

Monkey versus parrot: which would you wager to win?  Plus, here's some maledicta from a c. 1890 ad for luncheon meat.

It's nice when authors give some advance notice of a red herring.  In this case, though, the red herring is not a misleading clue but an actual fish.  From Snarleyyow Or the Dog Fiend by Frederick Marryat, 1837.

"'Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.' —Young.  From A Practical Grammar by Stephen Watkins Clark, 1847.

"Veni—vidi—skedaddleali."  By Harry Bullock-Webster, ca. 1875.  Scanned by the University of British Columbia Library.

Here's some maledicta from Hearst's Magazine, 1913.  How many can you decode?  We've translated them as follows:

The circle overlapping an asterisk, followed by three exclamation points, means "asshole."

The D with a period means "damn."

The lopsided M with its four strokes means the four-syllable "motherfucker."

The lopsided H with its long cross stroke is a very cross "Hell."

But what about the I and question mark?  We couldn't find a single list of swear words that included any beginning with I.  Yet the letter I is in itself a swear word.  "'I' is a curse: 'I' is the labeled 'I' of oppression and condemnation.  'I' feels itself superior to other 'I's" (Lily Splane, "Elegy for the 'I,'" Quantum Consciousness).

Here's the Bhutan word for "entering the mouth of one's own accord," just as these two are voluntarily stepping into a giant mouth at The Enchanted Forest in Oregon.

"The letter that I didn't write is here," altho' it's only a wish.  From 1911. 

Here's the only instance of "jiggswiggered" we have found in print, from "The Sinfulness of Skippy" by Owen Johnson, in Hearst's International, 1922.

Here are the results of 1902's mixed metaphor contest, in Black and White Budget.

"The Tourist's Book of Welsh Place-Names."  Date indecipherable.

For what this means, see (or course) our very own One-Letter Words: A Dictionary (and though the hardcover is out of print, the e-version remains "out there").  Our illustration is from The Galaxy magazine, 1866.

"Saturated void" is a geotechnical term, but Tim Flohr Sørensen uses it to describe a cemetery:

It may appear rather straightforward to connect cemeteries with the notion of absence.  After all, a cemetery is most often seen as a place for the dead, who are frequently conceived as absent, gone, missing or lost.  The state of being — or non-being — of the dead is otherwise poorly defined, and may simply be considered a form of "no moreness."  At the same time, the cemetery can be said to contain the absent, because it is ordinarily a place where prolonged spatial and material relations to the deceased are allowed to exist as opposed to e.g. a mass grave, where the dead are meant to disappear. ... [Cemeteries are] places of highly complex incorporations of presences and absences.  ...  [A]bsence is articulated and perceived as an emotional rupture but also as concrete and material voids.  Likewise, presence is articulated both as the physical being-there and the feeling of nearness and immediacy in the midst of the fragmentation posed by the death of a relative.  ("A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture," An Anthropology of Absence)

Did nobody tell the LSAT writers, who "always use the literal (or dictionary) meaning of a word," that the word set alone famously has over 460 definitions?