Astle - 101 Weird Words (and Three Fakes): From Ambidextrous to Zugzwang

First published by Allen & Unwin in 2018

Copyright text, David Astle 2018

Copyright illustrations, Paul Tippett 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

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Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76063 366 0

eBook ISBN 978 1 76087 010 2

For teaching resources, explore

www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

Cover design: Sandra Nobes

Cover illustrations: Paul Tippett

CONTENTS

Can you groak? Do you know a lava-lava from a muu-muu? Have you ever seen a chatoyant kalamazoo in a vomitorium?

Heres the book to help you know, one way or the other.

Soon we zoom from ambidextrous to zugzwang, meeting weirdness at every turn. Some words you will know already, but not the secrets they hide. Other words you may not know, like risley or rhopalic, quidnunc or glabella, but all four are worth meeting, believe me.

Soon youll bump into belladonna and levidrome, plus a hundred other astounding words, discovering what they mean and how they ended up in English. (Warning: some stories involve smelly cheese and old undies.) Theres a helpful guide to pronouncing each oddity, too.

You can also play detective, snooping out my three fake words hiding among the hundred and one others. It wont be easy, but see if you can spot them.

Then again, if you prefer to know which words are real and which are phony, take a peek at the last page. Or check there when your detective work is done. I bet you wont score three out of three!

More than a dictionary, more than a mystery, 101 Weird Words (and 3 Fakes) is also a book abounding in mini-puzzles, corny riddles and cool word-facts, not to mention Pauls zany pictures.

What more do you need? Time to get wordy. Get weird. And get reading.

[AM-bee-DEX-truss]

Put up both hands if you know what AMBIDEXTROUS means. Thats right ambidextrous people are skilled with both hands.

Cooks who pick their nose with either left or right forefingers are ambidextrous. Same goes for footballers who kick with either foot. Hands or feet it doesnt matter which extremity, so long as youre handy on both sides.

Speaking of sides, look what happens when AMBIDEXTROUS is cut in half. See anything amazing?

AMBIDE / XTROUS

To spot the secret, count the vowels. All five are there, but thats not the coolest part. Because AMBIDEXTROUS has twelve unique letters, not one repeat. So why split the word in two? As a clue, think about the alphabet.

Can you see the secret? Here we go: AMBIDE the words first half uses six letters from the alphabets first half. Then comes XTROUS the second half, a set of six letters from the alphabets other half. Believe it or not, ambidextrous is ambidextrous!

Jugglers juggle AMBIDEXTROUSLY, one more spectacular word fourteen letters with no letter repeated!

WOW!

PUZZLE

RIDDLE

[ay-MOZ-nee-ACK]

Every summer, I turn into a blood bank. My customers are mosquitoes, who visit all hours of the night, jabbing my arms and legs for more business.

Im quite the buzz with mosquitoes; my blood is the tastiest in the street.

How I wish to be an AMOSNIAC, a person whose blood doesnt delight those little suckers. Camping trips would be twice the fun with no jabs or scabs to pester me.

Mosquito comes from musca in Latin, their word for fly. And when I say fly I mean the bug, not the zip or the art of wagging your wings mid-air. Mosquito in fact means little fly, despite both bugs flying in separate clouds.

But give me flies any day of the week, or any night. Im not fussy. Flies are a picnic compared to a mozzie swarm. Sure, flies are annoying but mosquitoes really needle me. Are you a blood bank or an amosniac?

Find the right rhyme for each word below and you can reveal a creepy mozzie fact.

AUSSIES BAN PINK TREE LIMES WHERE SKATE FIN MUD.

Mozzies can drink three times their weight in blood.

[AM-purr-sand]

Fish & chips are delicious, especially with a sprinkle of salt & vinegar.

Did you gobble that last sentence easily? I bet you did, because the AMPERSAND is part & parcel of modern writing.

Like an awkward 8 with a cute twin-tail, the ampersand is better known as the and-symbol. Ampersand is short for and per se, meaning and by itself, one doodle doing the work of a common word, just as @ means at, or $ is dollar.

The ampersand has been around for over two thousand years. Graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, a town buried by volcanic ash, is full of ampersands at least the early version of the emblem. Rather than a wonky 8, the symbol resembled this:

Ampersands are popular in brand names too, making them easier to squeeze onto signs & labels. Plenty of passwords include ampersands as well, the curly squiggle a dollop of mystery to sit amid the usual letters & numbers.

Before emojis ruled the web, there were things called emoticons, faces built with keyboard symbols. For example, :-(was the modern , while :-& was the emoticon for tongue-tied .

[ahr-kee-OPP-tuh-riks]