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Cabbage. Lewis Carroll once wrote to a little girl: “With the first seven letters of the alphabet, I can make a word.” That word was big-faced (ABCDEFG with an I). Clever, clever, but big-faced has questionable status as a word.

The more familiar cabbage is one of a number of seven-letter piano words, ones that can be spelled out using the musical notes ABCDEFG. Other seven-letter examples are acceded, baggage, defaced, and effaced. The ten-letter cabbage-bed, listed in at least one dictionary, is a tempting possibility.

Cabbage-headed (thirteen letters), meaning “stupid,” has been suggested as the longest recognizable word cobbled entirely from letters in the first half of the alphabet. Other candidates include the reduplications diddle-daddled and fiddle-faddled.

Boldface and feedback are the shortest words (eight letters) that contain each of the first six letters of our alphabet.

Finally, note that cabbage is one of a number of slangy culinary metaphors for money: beans, bread, cabbage, candy, chicken feed, clams, dough, gravy, kale, lettuce, peanuts, spinach, and sugar.

(See COCKAMAMIE, METAPHOR, NONSUPPORTS.)

Cakewalk. The cakewalk was originally a nineteenth-century dance invented by African-Americans in the antebellum South. It was intended to satirize the stiff ballroom promenades of white plantation owners, who favored the rigidly formal dances of European high society.

Cakewalking slaves lampooned these stuffy moves by accentuating their high kicks, bows, and imaginary hat doffings, mixing the cartoonish gestures together with traditional African steps. Likely unaware of the dance’s derisive roots, the whites often invited their slaves to participate in Sunday contests, to determine which dancers were most elegant and inventive. The winners would receive a piece of cake, a prize that became the dance’s familiar name. Doesn’t that just take the cake?

After Emancipation, the contest tradition continued in black communities; the Oxford English Dictionary dates the widespread adoption of cakewalk to the late 1870s. It was around this time that the cakewalk came to mean “easy”—not because the dance was particularly simple to do but because of its languid pace and association with weekend leisure.

(See COMPANION, COUCH POTATO, DACHSHUND, HAMBURGER, PUMPERNICKEL, SALARY, TOAST.)

Caliber. At the end of the nineteenth century, a crisis occurred in the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The man who was shot out of the cannon every day was asked by his wife to quit his high-risk profession, much to the distress of the great Phineas Taylor Barnum. PT, whose wit was equal to his showmanship, summoned the fellow and said, “I beg you to reconsider. Men of your caliber are hard to find.”

Barnum, of course, was perpetrating a playful pun on the word caliber, which, from its earliest beginnings, meant “the diameter of a bullet or other projectile.”

Our high-caliber English language is going great guns, so let’s go gunning for the guns and cannons that stand ready to fire when we speak and write:

I’ve just shot my bolt on the subject of guns and cannons in our everyday parlance—lock, stock, and barrel. Please don’t label me a trigger-happy son of a gun if I shoot you one last pistol-packing explanation.

The lock, stock, and barrel are the three main components of a gun that together compose essentially the entire weapon. Thus, lock, stock, and barrel has come to mean the entirety of something—the whole shooting match.

(See FIRED, METAPHOR.)

Canary. From what creature did the Canary Islands derive their name? Dogs, of course. The Canary Islands were so dubbed after the large dogs (canes grandes) found there. The familiar yellow songbirds, also native creatures thereabout, were named after the islands, rather than the other way around.

(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CAPER, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)

Candidate. When he went to the Forum in Roman times, a candidate for office wore a bleached white toga to symbolize his humility, purity of motive, and candor. The original Latin root, candidatus, meant “one who wears white,” from the belief that white was the color of purity and probity. There was wishful thinking even in ancient Roman politics, even though a white-clad Roman candidatus was accompanied by sectatores, followers who helped him acquire votes by bargaining and bribery. The Latin parent verb candere, “to shine, to glow,” can be recognized in the English words candid, candor, candle, and incandescent.

We know that candidates are ambitious; it’s also worth knowing that ambition developed from the Latin ambitionem, “a going about,” from the going about of candidates for office in ancient Rome.

(See FILIBUSTER, GERRYMANDER, IDIOT, OSTRACIZE, POLITICS.)

Caper. When someone is capricious and capers about, he or she is acting like a frisky, playful billy goat. Caprice, capricious, caper, and Capricorn all come to us from the Latin caper, “goat.” Goats caper through our English vocabulary:

(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)

Carnival. We think of carnivals as traveling entertainments with rides, sideshows, games, cotton candy, and balloons; but the first carnivals were pre-Lenten celebrations—a last fling before penitence. The Latin word parts, carne, “meat, flesh,” and vale, “farewell,” indicate that the earliest carnivals were seasons of feasting and merrymaking, “a farewell to meat,” just before Lent.

Carnival is one of hundreds of words and expressions that began in religion (from Latin religionem, “respect for what is sacred”). Because our society has become secularized, we overlook the religious foundation of our everyday parlance:

(See BIBLE, GOOD-BYE.)

Casino. Start with the i in the middle and move left. When you get to the c, loop to the back and proceed left for two letters. You’ll come up with is a con. Hmm.

Catch-22. The working title for the late Joseph Heller’s modern classic novel about the mindlessness of war was Catch-18, a reference to a military regulation that keeps the pilots in the story flying one suicidal mission after another. The only way to be excused from flying such missions is to be declared insane, but asking to be excused is proof of a rational mind and bars excuse.

Shortly before the appearance of Heller’s book in 1961, Leon Uris’s Mila 18 was published. To avoid confusion with the title of Uris’s war novel, Heller and his editor decided to change Catch-18 to Catch-22. The choice turned out to be both fortunate and fortuitous as the 22 more rhythmically and symbolically captures the double duplicity of both the military regulation itself and the bizarre world that Heller shapes in the novel. (“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” observes Yossarian. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agrees.)

During the more-than-five decades since its literary birth, catch-22, generally lower-cased, has come to mean any predicament in which we are caught coming and going and in which the very nature of the problem denies and defies its solution. So succinctly does catch-22 embody the push-me-pull-you absurdity of modern life that the word has become the most frequently employed and deeply embedded allusion from all of American literature.

Here’s a small shelf of words and expressions that started out in twentieth-century literature:

(See CHARACTONYM, CHORTLE, DOGHOUSE, NERD, OZ, PANDEMONIUM.)

Catchphrase is the most frequently used English word containing six consonants in a row, an internal pattern that also marks borschts, latchstring, watchspring, weltschmerz, and Knightsbridge, a district in London.

(See CHRISTCHURCH.)

Charactonym. The name of a literary character that is especially suited to his or her personality. The enormous and enduring popularity of Charles Dickens’s works springs in part from the writer’s skill at creating memorable charactonyms—Scrooge, the tightfisted miser; Mr. Gradgrind, the tyrannical schoolmaster; Jaggers, the rough-edged lawyer; and Miss Havisham (“have a sham”), the jilted spinster who lives in an illusion. John Bunyan’s Mr. Wordly Wiseman, Susanna Centlivre’s Simon Pure, and Walter Scott’s Dr. Dryasdust are other famous fictional charactonyms.

Modern examples include Willie Loman (“low man”) in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Jim Trueblood in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Not that many years ago, a doctor show named “Marcus Welby” ruled the television ratings. The title of the show and name of the lead character were purposely designed to make us think of “make us well be.”

(See CATCH-22, CHORTLE, DOGHOUSE, NERD, OZ, PANDEMONIUM.)

Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg is the Algonquian name for a lake near Webster, Massachusetts. The word means “You fish on your side; I fish on my side; nobody fish in the middle.” Fifteen of its forty-five letters are g’s, and not one is an e or i.

(See FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, HIPPOPOTOMONSTROSESQUIPEDALIAN, HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS, LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDDROBWLLLLANTYSILOGOGOCH, PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOKONIOSIS, SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS.)

Chiasmus. “Success is getting what you want; happiness us wanting what you get.” That’s not only a profound statement and a common-sense truth. It’s also an example of chiasmus—a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases in order to produce a rhetorical or humorous effect. The chi in chiasmus stands for the letter X in the Greek alphabet, and the word comes from the Greek khiasmós inline-image, meaning “crossing; to mark with a X.” In most chiastic statements, if you stack the first clause on the second and then draw straight lines from the key words in the first to the second, you will draw an X. Try it with a chiastic quotation like “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Chiasmi (the formal plural form) show up in some of the most clever, thought-provoking, and memorable pronouncements in history:

Quotations like these have been used for centuries by the world’s greatest thinkers, leaders, and entertainers—from Aristotle (“We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us”) to Shakespeare (“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”) to Mae West (“It’s not the men in my life that count; it’s the life in my men”). From ancient Sanskrit to this very moment, chiasmi have been employed to inspire, insult, seduce, teach, and provoke.

And above all, please remember: it’s better to leave the house and kiss your wife good-bye than to leave your wife and kiss the house good-bye.

(See HYSTERON PROTERON, IRONY, METAPHOR, METONYMY, OXYMORON, PARADOX, ZEUGMA.)

Chocoholic. From the Arabic word al-koh’l and the Latin ending -ic we cheerfully sever -aholic and create a spanking new suffix that means “one addicted to.” Among the -aholic clones recorded by linguistic observers we find workaholic, chocoholic, Cokeaholic, newsaholic, wordaholic, sexaholic, shopaholic, and spendaholic. Perhaps we shall one day see and hear aholaholic to describe someone who succumbs to the irresistible impulse to use the suffix -aholic to describe irresistible impulses.

(See HAMBURGER.)

Chortle. Lewis Carroll made his stories a wonderland of wordplay. The verbivorous author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll evinced a prodigious talent for merging two words and beheading parts of one or both. He called these inventions portmanteau words because he loved to scrunch two words into one as clothes are crammed into a portmanteau, or traveling bag. The most famous example of Lewis Carroll’s facile gift for blending is his “Jabberwocky” poem, which begins:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the word slithy, he answers: “Well slithy means ‘lithe and slimy.’ You see, it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed into one word.” Dumpty later interprets mimsy: “Well, then, mimsy is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you).” Two words that appear later in “Jabberwocky” have become enshrined in dictionaries of the English language—chortle (“chuckle” + “snort”) and galumph (“gallop” + “triumph”). When we today eat Frogurt, quaff Cranapple juice and Fruitopia, have brunch (“breakfast” + “lunch”), take a staycation (“stay” + “vacation”) rather than stay at a motel (“motor” + “hotel”), ride our moped (“motor” + “pedal”), lament the smog (“smoke” + “fog”), learn from webinars (“web” + “seminars”), play the game of Fictionary (“fiction” + “dictionary”), and save with groupons (“group” + “coupons”), we are sharing Lewis Carroll’s ginormous (“giant” + “enormous”) delight in portmanteau words.

(See CATCH-22, CHARACTONYM, DOGHOUSE, NERD, OZ, PANDEMONIUM.)

Christchurch, the most British city in New Zealand, contains ten consonants (clustered 3-4-3) and only two vowels, an astonishing 5-1 ratio. Note the three occurrences of ch.

(See CATCHPHRASE.)

Chthonic (“relating to the spirits of the underworld”) is among the handful of tongue-tangling, ear-rinsing words that begin with four consonants, joined by phthisis (“tuberculosis”) and pschent (“an Egyptian double crown”).

Quatri-consonantial words that begin with the letter s are usually of German or Yiddish origin and begin with sch—schlemiel, schlep, schlimazel, schlock, schlump, schmaltz, schmatte, schmear, schmo, schmooze, schmuck, schmutz, schnapps, schnauzer, schnitzel, schtick, schtupp, and schwa.

Circus. When you speak a three-ring circus, you are actually repeating yourself because circus echoes kírkos inline-image, the Greek word for “ring, circle.”

“Hey, First-of-May! Tell the butcher in the back yard to stay away from the bulls, humps, stripes, and painted ponies. We have some cherry pie for him before doors and spec.” Sound like doubletalk? Actually, it’s circus talk—or, more technically, circus argot, argot being a specialized vocabulary used by a particular group for mutual bonding and private communication. Communities are most likely to develop a colorful argot when they have limited contact with the world outside of their group. The circus community is a perfect example of the almost monastic self-containment in which argot flourishes. Big top people travel in very close quarters, and because they usually go into a town, set up, do a show, tear down, and leave, they have little contact with the locals. They socialize with each other, they intermarry, and their children acquire the argot from the time they start to talk.

First-of-May designates anyone who is brand-new to circus work. That’s because circuses used to start their tours around the first day in May. A candy butcher is a concessionaire who sells cotton candy (floss) and other food, along with drinks and souvenirs, to the audience during the show. The backyard is the place just behind the circus entrance where performers wait to do their acts. A bull is a circus elephant, even though most of them are female. Among other circus beasts, humps, stripes, and painted ponies are, respectively, camels, tigers, and zebras. Cherry pie is extra work, probably from chairy pie, the setting up of extra chairs around the arena. Doors! is the cry that tells circus folk that the audience is coming in to take their seats, and spec is short for spectacle, the big parade of all the performers.

Trust me: This topic ain’t no dog and pony show—the designation for a small circus with just a few acts, also known as a mud show.

What we call the toilet circus folk call the donniker, the hot dog or grill concession trailer where the circus can snag a snack is a grease joint, and a circus performer is a kinker. The townspeople are towners or rubes. In the old days, when large groups of towners who believed (sometimes accurately) that they had been fleeced by dishonest circus people, they would come back in a mob to seek retribution. The cry Hey rube! went out, and everyone knew that the fight was on.

A full house is called a straw house from the days when straw would be laid down in front of the seats to accommodate more people than the seats could hold. Distances between engagements were called jumps. Thus, an old circus toast rings out: “May your lots be grassy, your jumps short, and your houses straw.”

Nothing now to mark the spot

But a littered vacant lot.

Sawdust in a heap, and where

The center ring stood, grass worn bare.

But remains the alphabet,

Ready to leap and pirouette.

May the spangled letters soar

In your head forevermore.

(See NUT.)

CIVIC. It’s not just a palindrome, but, along with CIVIL, LIVID, MIMIC, and VIVID, the longest word (five letters) composed entirely of Roman numerals. If we assign each letter its Roman numerical value, mimic yields the highest total—2,102—and civil the lowest—157.

(See ADAM, AGAMEMNON, KINNIKINNIK, NAPOLEON, PALINDROME, SENSUOUSNESS, WONTON, ZOONOOZ.)

Clam. Many a word maven has been asked, “In the comparison happy as a clam, why are clams so happy?”

To arrive at an answer, one needs to know that the expression is elliptical, that is, something is left out. When we discover the missing part, we unlock the origin and true meaning of the phrase. As it turns out, happy as a clam is little more than half of the original saying, the full simile being happy as a clam at high tide. A clam at high tide is sensibly happy because, in high water, humans can’t capture the shellfish to mince, steam, bake, stuff, casinoed, or Rockefeller it, and high tide brings small yummy organisms to the mollusk.

Similarly, although we usually say, the proof is in the pudding, the full explanation is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And to harp on, meaning “to dwell on the same topic,” is in fact a shortening of the old phrase to harp on one string, which meant “to play the same note on a harp string over and over.”

Finally, we may well wonder why people say naked as a jaybird when jaybirds are covered with feathers. Here’s the first printed citation of naked as a jaybird, as it appeared more than a century ago, in 1893: “He will have the humbug qualifications of cow-boy stripped from his poor worthless carcass so quickly that he would feel like a jay bird with his tail feathers gone.” Turns out, therefore, that a jaybird is naked only when some of its nether plumage is missing.

(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CAPER, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)

Cliché comes to us from the Old French cliquer, “to click.” That’s the sound printers used to make when they took a wood engraving and struck it into molten lead to make a cast. This mold was a stereotype, from the Greek stereós inline-image, “solid,” which was used to reproduce a picture over and over. Hence, the metaphorical stereotype, which forms a fixed, unchangeable image in the mind’s eye.

Clichés begin their lives as imaginative expressions and comparisons. That’s how they become clichés. Like a phonograph needle, our words settle into the grooves that the clichés have worn into our speech and writing. Phrases that once possessed power become trite, hackneyed, and lifeless—words that themselves are clichés for clichés.

Using clichés is as easy as ABC, one-two- three, pie, falling off a log, shooting fish in a barrel, and taking candy from a baby. They make us happy as a clam, lark, kid in a candy shop, and a pig in … slop.

But if you want to hit a bull’s eye, the spot, the jackpot, the ground running, the ball out of the park, and the nail on the head, then you should avoid clichés like the plague.

(See METAPHOR.)

Clue. In ancient Greek mythology, a dreadful monster called the Minotaur lived in a labyrinth on the island of Crete. Theseus, the founder-king of Athens, volunteered to enter the labyrinth and slay the beast in order to stanch the constant slaughter of Athenian youth fed to the creature. Ariadne, the daughter of the Cretan king, had fallen in love with Theseus and provided him with a clewe (Middle English), a ball of thread, that he unwound as he went into the maze. After Theseus decapitated the Minotaur, the thread guided him out of the heart of the maze.

Gradually clewe, now clue, came to mean anything that helps us to solve a baffling situation, something that leads us from the unknown to the known.

(See ECHO, JOVIAL, TANTALIZE, WEDNESDAY.)

Cockamamie hails from decalcomania, the process of making superficial tattoos or affixing decals to windows and walls. Because this practice was seen as fake art, cockamamie broadened to describe anything that was phony or worthless.

The odd letters of our alphabet—ACEGIKMOQSUWY—include all the major vowels, along with Y. I’m not being cockamamie when I say that the longest, unaffixed word that can be strung together from such odd letters is the ten-letter cockamamie.

(See BALDERDASH, GOBBLEDYGOOK, METAPHOR.)

Cockney. In the Oxford Dictionary of Slang, editors John Simpson and John Ayto identify slang as “English with its sleeves rolled up, its shirttails dangling, and its shoes covered with mud.” One of the hardest-working and most earthy of slangs is that of London’s East End cockneys.

The word cockney originally meant an odd or misshapen egg. Traditionally, a cockney is anyone born within the sound of Bow Bells, the bells of Bow Church, also called St. Mary-le-Bow Church. By Victorian times, the cockney dialect had spread well beyond the tintinnabulation of those bells.

Rhyming slang was first officially recorded in the mid-nineteenth century. In a series of articles published in the Morning Chronicle in 1849–50, Henry Mayhew called it “the new style of cadgers’ cant, all done on the rhyming principle.” Mayhew suggested that cockney slang originated in the language of beggars and thieves and was fabricated to baffle the police.

It is an indirect sort of slang that substitutes a rhyme for the word in mind. Thus, in “Pass the Aristotle,” the last word, as you can guess, stands for bottle. In “Be sure to get the brass tacks,” tacks stand for facts, leading some word sleuths to deduce cockney as the source of the cliché “Let’s get down to brass tacks.” “It’s all as plain as the I suppose on your boat race”—the nose on your face.

A greater number of such expressions substitute not a word but a phrase.

The process of substitution does not stop with rhyme. In clipped speech, the actual rhyming word is often omitted. Only the first part of the phrase is spoken, and the rhyme and the word in mind are both assumed. Thus, in “‘Ow ye doin’, me old china?” “my old china” means “my old friend: china plate”—mate. I’ll bet you can’t hardly Adam it. “Adam and Eve”—believe.

Companion originates from the Latin com, “together,” and panis, “bread.” You and I are companions in our love of language because together we break the bread of words. That wage earners are called breadwinners reminds us of the importance of bread in medieval life. Not surprisingly, both lord and lady are well-bread words. Lord descends from the Old English hlaf, “loaf,” and weard, “keeper,” and lady from hlaf, “loaf,” and dige, “kneader.”

In days of yore, housewives often needed to scrimp, even on essentials. Whenever wheat was in short supply, the bottom crust of pies was made with rye meal. Wheat was used only for the upper crust. Soon upper crust entered everyday speech to mean the socially select.

(See CAKEWALK, COUCH POTATO, DACHSHUND, HAMBURGER, HOAGIE, METAPHOR, PUMPERNICKEL, SALARY, SANDWICH, TOAST.)

Compass. Read this quatrain, and answer the question “What am I?”:

In my front a twisted thorn.

On my right a scrambled seat.

Behind me is a broken shout,

And on my left a shattered stew.

The answer is: I am a compass. Thorn, seat, shout, and stew anagram into north, east, south, and west.

(See ANAGRAM, DANIEL, EPISCOPAL, ESTONIA, SET, SILENT, SPARE, STAR, STOP, TIME, WASHINGTON, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.)

Congress. People love to make fun of members of Congress. Mark Twain sneered, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Others have snickered, “If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress?”

The following anti-congressional item whizzes around the Internet: “Baboons are the noisiest, most obnoxiously aggressive of all primates. So what group noun do we assign to these creatures? A congress of baboons!” This claim is bogus. A bunch of baboons is usually a troop and occasionally a rumpus.

We all know that a bunch of sheep crowded together is a flock, that a group of antelope loping together is a herd, and that a bevy of bees buzzing together is a swarm. But have you ever heard of a covey of quail, a cowardice of curs, a labor of moles, a cete of badgers, a covert of coots, a flush of mallards, a kindle of kittens, or a plump of wildfowl? Most of these collective nouns evolved during the Middle Ages, when the sophisticated art of hunting demanded an equally sophisticated vocabulary to name the objects of the chase.

Here are some more of the most beguiling of these group nouns:

a barren of mules

a charm of finches

a clowder of cats

a convocation of eagles

a crash of rhinoceroses

an exaltation of larks

a gaggle of geese

a leap of leopards

a murder of crows

a murmuration of starlings

an ostentation of peacocks

a parliament of owls

a shrewdness of apes

a skulk of foxes

a sounder of swine

an unkindness of ravens

Convict. Have you noticed that a great number of two-syllable words are nouns when their first syllable is stressed and verbs when their second syllable is stressed, as in “If they conVICT me, I’ll become a CONvict”? This phenomenon is sometimes known as Phyfe’s rule.

The person who wrote the following ad apparently had not mastered the subtleties of this pattern: “Unmarried women wanted to pick fruit and produce at night.”

Similarly, on the side of my recycling bin is emblazoned:

City of San Diego
Environmental Services
Refuse Collection

What a waste of resources!

Other examples of first-syllable stress = noun; second-syllable stress = verb include:

addict

combat

conduct

contract

decrease

digest

impact

import

object

perfume

permit

present

progress

rebel

record

refund

reject

suspect

transfer

transplant

A few three-syllable examples, such as ATtribute/atTRIbute, DISconnect/disconNECT, and INterrupt/ interRUPT, fill out this category.

Cool. Nobody is quite sure where the word slang comes from. According to H. L. Mencken, slang developed in the eighteenth century (it was first recorded in 1756) either from an erroneous past tense of sling (sling-slang-slung) or from the word language itself, as in (thieve)s’lang(uage) and (beggar)s’lang(uage). The second theory makes the point that jargon and slang originate and are used by a particular trade or class group, but slang words are slung around to some extent by a whole population.

Slang words generally lead mayfly lives—here today, gone tomorrow. Yet cool, a slang adjective that means “excellent,” has hung around for more than seventy years and shows no sign of retiring. And cool remains cool even in the face of competition from more than seventy competitors that stepped up into our slanguage after the birth of cool—ace, awesome, bad, bangin’, beast, bitchin’, blazin’, bomb-ass, chill, chunky, cool beans, copacetic, corny, cretaceous, cruisin’, da bomb, def, dope, ducky, endsville, epic, fantabulous, far out, fetch, flipville, fly, fresh, frickin’ A, gear, groovy, hip, hot, ice cold, ill, kick-ass, kickin’, killer, large, mint, like wow!, nasty, neato, nifty, outa-sight, peachy keen, phat, pimpin’, primo, rad, righteous, sassy, scoopin’, sick, sickening, slammin’, smokin’, smooth, stylin’, super, sweet, the max, the most, tite, tops, totally tubular, tuff, uber, unreal, whoa, and wicked.

How cool is that?

Cop. The standard explanation traces cop or copper, meaning “police,” to copper buttons worn on early police uniforms, or to copper police badges supposedly issued in some cities, but there is no convincing evidence for this conjecture.

Another theory explains cop as an acronym standing for “constable on patrol” or “chief of police.” But these acronymic etymologies almost always turn out to be spurious, after-the-fact explanations. Another inconvenient truth is that acronyms were virtually unknown in English before the twentieth century, while cop itself was well-established by the mid-nineteenth century.

In reality, the law enforcement sense of cop and copper harks back to the Latin word capere, meaning “to seize,” which also gives us capture. Cop as a slang term meaning “to catch, snatch, or grab” took its place in English in the eighteenth century. Criminals apprehended by the police were said to have been “copped”—caught by the “coppers” or “cops.”

(See POSH.)

Corpse. Subtract an e from corpse, a word that ends with a silent letter, and you’ll come up with corps, a word characterized by two silent letters.

Couch potato compares lumpish watchers of television to lumpy potatoes: The longer couch potatoes sit, the deeper they put down their roots and the more they come to resemble potatoes. But there’s more than just a vegetable image here; couch potato is a pun on the word tuber. A potato is the tuber of a plant, and boob tuber was an early term for someone watching television, i.e. the boob tube.

(See CAKEWALK, COMPANION, COUCH, DACHSHUND, HAMBURGER, PUMPERNICKEL, SALARY, SANDWICH, TOAST.)

Covivant. What do you call the person with whom you are romantically entangled and with whom you are living? Friend, boyfriend, and girlfriend are too coy and do not identify the live-in arrangement, nor do lover, mistress, and paramour, even though they are fine, old words. Cohabitor is a mouthful that is cold and passionless, while partner has recently narrowed to describe only gay couples (and sounds too businesslike to me). Roommate and POSSLQ (“persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters”) identify the joint living arrangement but not the emotional arrangements, while significant other suggests a close, caring relationship but not necessarily the cohabitation.

My candidate for the bon mot to catch and crystallize the person living with you in what used to be called “sin” is covivant. The word captures and coalesces the intimacy of lover and significant other and the cohabitational accuracy of roommate and POSSLQ. Fashioned from the Latin co, “together,” and the French vivant, “living,” covivant is bilingually endearing. Its Latinness communicates a sense of permanence and stability, and its Frenchness sprays the perfume of romance.

Viva covivant!

(See GAY.)

Crestfallen. The sport of cockfighting contributes to the poetry of our everyday prose. From the cockpit (yes, the modern meaning of the word comes from the cramped arena of flying feathers) we gain several common metaphors. A well-heeled fighting cock is fitted with sharp spurs on its feet designed to inflict maximum damage. Nowadays, to be well-heeled means to be equipped with the most powerful of weapons: money.

A hackle is a long, narrow, shiny feather on the necks of certain birds, gamecocks among them. In the heat of battle, a fighting cock’s hackles become erect as a demonstration of its fury. That’s why, when the going gets tough, people get their hackles up.

If that going gets too tough, people can become crestfallen. Crestfallen, meaning “dispirited or defeated,” does not refer to the act of dropping one’s toothpaste. As victory approaches, the crest of a fighting cock rises, deep red and rigid. But when defeat is imminent, the crest droops, and the bird becomes crestfallen.

(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CAPER, CLAM, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)

Crossword is the reverse of its original form. The first such puzzle was concocted by one Arthur S. Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool and games section editor of the New York World. On December 21, 1913, Wynne’s poser appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York World, radiating into a diamond and containing no black squares. He modeled the puzzle after the traditional British word square, a group of words whose letters are arranged so they will read the same horizontally and vertically. No surprise, then, that Wynne christened his creation word-cross.

Four weeks later, typesetters at the newspaper inadvertently switched the two halves of word-cross, and—presto! change-o!—the crossword puzzle was born.

Nobody utters a cross word about crossword puzzles. In fact, the genre has gone on to become the most popular word game on earth.

(See SIDEBURNS.)