Ecdysiast. When exotic dancer Gypsy Rose Lee asked H. L. Mencken to coin a dignified word for a stripper, the author and critic came up with ecdysiast, from the Greek ecdysis , “to molt.” The metaphoric comparison to a bird losing its feathers is appropriate, clear, and vivid.

Echo. Of all the literary sources that flow into our English language, mythology is one of the richest. We who are alive today constantly speak and hear and write and read the names of the ancient gods and goddesses and heroes and heroines, even if we don’t always know it.

Echo, for example, is an echo of a story that is more than two millennia old. Echo was a beautiful nymph who once upon a time aided Zeus in a love affair by keeping Hera, his wife, occupied in conversation. As a punishment for such verbal meddling, Hera, the queen of the gods, confiscated Echo’s power to initiate conversation and allowed her to repeat only the last words of anything she heard.

Such was a sorry enough fate, but later Echo fell madly in love with an exceedingly handsome Greek boy, Narcissus, who, because of Echo’s peculiar handicap, would have nothing to do with her. So deeply did the nymph grieve for her unrequited love, that she wasted away until nothing was left but her voice, always repeating the last words she heard.

The fate that befell Narcissus explains why his name has been transformed into words like narcissism and narcissistic, “pertaining to extreme self-love.” One day Narcissus looked into a still forest lake and beheld his own face in the water, although he did not know it. He at once fell in love with the beautiful image just beneath the surface, and he, like Echo, pined away for a love that could never be consummated.

(See CLUE, JOVIAL, TANTALIZE.)

Eerie is the most common example among five-letter words with just one consonant. Add audio—five letters, four vowels, three syllables—adieu, and queue. Then there’s Ouija—the name of a popular Parker Brothers board game of divination that is still used for fun and fraud. Ouija is a conjunction of yes in French and German. The trademark is usually pronounced weeja, yet the spelling of Ouija includes every major vowel but e.

(See AI, DEEDED, RODE.)

Egress, from the Latin e, “out” + gress, “step,” is a fancy word for exit, and P. T. Barnum, the Greatest Showman on Earth, made creative use of it.

Barnum’s American Museum in Lower Manhattan was so popular that it attracted up to fifteen thousand customers a day, and some would spend the entire day there. This cut into profits, as the museum would be too full to squeeze another person in. In classic Barnum style, PT put up above a cage holding a mother tiger and her cubs a sign that read, “TIGRESS.” Then, over a doorway next to that sign, he put up another sign that said, “TO THE EGRESS.” Many customers followed that sign, looking for an exhibit featuring an exotic female bird. What they found instead was themselves out the door (“the egress”) and back on the street. Once they had exited the building, the door would lock behind them, and if they wanted to get back in, they had to pay another admission charge.

(See CALIBER.)

Einstein. You don’t have to be an Einstein to see that the name Einstein is a double violation of the “i before e, except after c” rule.

Among the dozens of instances in which e precedes i in uncapitalized words are this dozen:

caffeine

counterfeit

either

feisty

heifer

height

kaleidoscope

leisure

protein

seize

sovereign

therein

And among words in which c is immediately followed by ie we note:

ancient

concierge

conscience

fancier

financier

glacier

omniscient

science

society

species

sufficient

tendencies

E-I, I-E—Oh?

There’s a rule that’s sufficeint, proficeint, efficeint.

For all speceis of spelling in no way deficeint.

While the glaceirs of ignorance icily frown,

This soveriegn rule warms, like a thick iederdown.

On words fiesty and wierd it shines from great hieghts,

Blazes out like a beacon, or skien of ieght lights.

It gives nieghborly guidance, sceintific and fair,

To this nonpariel language to which we are hier.

Now, a few in soceity fiegn to deride

And to forfiet thier anceint and omnisceint guide,

Diegn to worship a diety foriegn and hienous,

Whose counterfiet riegn is certain to pain us.

In our work and our liesure, our agenceis, schools,

Let us all wiegh our consceince, sieze proudly our rules!

It’s plebiean to lower our standards. I’ll neither

Give in or give up—and I trust you won’t iether!

(See GHOTI, HICCOUGH.)

Elbow anagrams into another body part, bowel, a category that seems to attract somewhat unmentionable regions, including spine/penis and ears/arse. The most arcane of these is the suture, defined not only as “the stitching of a wound or other opening,” but also as “the juncture of two bones, especially of the skull.” If we accept suture as a body part, it becomes an anatomical anagram of uterus.

(See ANAGRAM, EYE.)

Electric sparks from the Greek ēlektron , “beaming sun.” The second c in electric, electricity, and electrician all make different sounds.

Elizabeth, that popular, royal English name, sparks forth more nicknames than any other: Babette, Bess, Bessie, Bessy, Bet, Beth, Bethina, Betsey, Betsy, Betta, Bette, Bettie, Bettina, Bettine, Betty, Buffy, Elisa, Elise, Elissa, Elisse, Eliza, Ella, Ellie, Elsa, Else, Elsie, Ilse, Lib, Libbie, Libby, Lil, Lillian, Lillie, Lilo, Lily, Lilybet, Lilybeth, Lis, Lisa, Lisabet, Lisabeth, Lisbet, Lisbeth, Lise, Lisette, Lissa, Liz, Liza, Lizabeth, Lizbet, Lizbeth, Lize, Lizette, Lizolet, Lizza, Lizzie, and Lyssa. That’s more than fifty transmutations.

Encyclopedia glows from the Greek enkyklopaideíā : en, “in” + kyklos, “circle” + paideia, “education, child-rearing.” Altogether, the first meaning of encyclopedia was “to circle a child with learning.”

Enervate. After I spoke at a conference for teachers of English in a large state, one of the officers of the group stood up and effused, “Thank you, Doctor Lederer, for your most enervating performance.” She apparently thought that enervating means “energizing,” but it doesn’t. Enervating, from the Latin e, “out of” + nervus, “nerve, sinew,” means “to weaken,” which is what I hope I didn’t do to those English teachers.

Enervate is what I call a confusable word, one that doesn’t turn out to mean what it looks and sounds like. Here’s a tower of babbling words:

• Anchorite means “a person who lives in seclusion,” not “a sailor.”
• Antebellum means “before the war,” not “against war.”
• Cupidity means “a strong desire for wealth,” not “a strong desire for love.”
• Friable means “easily crumbled,” not “easily fried.”
• Fulsome means “offensive to the senses,” not “full, abundant.”
• Meretricious means “falsely attractive,” not “worthy.”
• Penultimate means “next to the last,” not “last, final.”
• Presently means “soon,” not “now.”
• Prosody means “the study of verse,” not “the study of prose.”
• Restive means “fidgety,” not “serene.”
• Risible means “disposed to laugh,” not “easily lifted.”
• Scarify means “to criticize cuttingly,” not “to frighten.”

And wherefore means “why,” not “where.” When Juliet sighs, “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” she is not trying to locate her new squeeze. Rather she is lamenting that the young man she’s jonesing for turns out to be a member of a rival and despised family, the Montagues. This interpretation is clarified by the lines that follow:

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

English. The rise of English as a planetary language is an unparalleled success story that begins long ago, in the middle of the fifth century A.D. At the onset of the Dark Ages, several large tribes of sea rovers—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—lived along the continental North Sea coast, from Denmark to Holland. They were a fierce warrior people who built beaked galleys and fought with huge battle-axes and battle hammers, burning towns, and carrying off anything they happened to want.

Around A.D. 449, these Teutonic plunderers sailed across the water and invaded the islands then known as Britannia. They found the land pleasant and the people, fighting among themselves, very easy to conquer, so they remained there. They brought with them a Low Germanic tongue that, in its new setting, became Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, the ancestor of the English we use today. During the reign of King Egbert in the ninth century, the land became known as Englaland, “the land of the Angles,” and the language Englisc, because the Angles were at that time the chief group.

Entrance. Note the unusual pattern of the end-rhymes in this poem:

Listen, readers, toward me bow.

Be friendly; do not draw the bow.

Please don’t try to start a row.

Sit peacefully, all in a row.

Don’t squeal like a big, fat sow.

Do not the seeds of discord sow.

Even though each couplet ends with the same word, the rhymes occur on every other line. That’s because bow, row, and sow each possess two different pronunciations and meanings. These rare pairings of etymologically unrelated look-alike words are called heteronyms:

A Hymn to Heteronyms

Please come through the entrance of this little poem.

I guarantee it will entrance you.

The content will certainly make you content,

And the knowledge gained sure will enhance you.

A boy moped around when his parents refused

For him a new moped to buy.

The incense he burned did incense him to go

On a tear with a tear in his eye.

He ragged on his parents, felt they ran him ragged.

His just deserts they never gave.

He imagined them out on some deserts so dry,

Where for water they’d search and they’d rave.

At present he just won’t present or converse

On the converse of each high-flown theory

Of circles and axes in math class; he has

Many axes to grind, isn’t cheery.

He tried to play baseball, but often skied out,

So when the snows came, he just skied.

But he then broke a leg putting on his ski boot

And his putting in golf was in need.

He once held the lead in a cross-country race,

Till his legs started feeling like lead,

And when the pain peaked, he looked kind of peaked.

His liver felt liver, then dead.

A number of times he felt number, all wound

Up, like one with a wound, not a wand.

His new TV console just couldn’t console

Or slough off a slough of despond.

The rugged boy paced ’round his shaggy rugged room,

And he spent the whole evening till dawn

Evening out the wild winds of his hate.

Now my anecdote winds on and on.

He thought: “Does the prancing of so many does

Explain why down dove the white dove,

Or why pussy cat has a pussy old sore

And bass sing in bass notes of their love?”

Do they always sing, “Do re mi” and stare, agape,

At eros, agape, each minute?

Their love’s not minute; there’s an overage of love.

Even overage fish are quite in it.

These bass fish have never been in short supply

As they supply spawn without waiting.

With their love fluids bubbling, abundant, secretive,

There’s many a secretive mating.

(See CAPITONYM.)

Episcopal. How sweet it is: Rearrange every letter in Episcopal, and you end up with a Popsicle and Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi-Cola was invented in 1893 in New Bern, North Carolina, by a pharmacist named Caleb Bradham, who owned a drug store just across the street from the town’s Episcopal church. According to town lore, the concoction went by the name “Brad’s Drink” for several years, but the inventor wasn’t completely happy with that. One day, according to the story, he glanced across the street and looked at the sign in front of the Episcopal church in a whole new way.

Presbyterian brings forth best in prayer, and Presbyterians yields Britney Spears, which could be the denomination’s best PR in years.

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

Estonia is not only a Baltic country in northern Europe. It is an anagram of the first seven letters in Etaoin Shrdlu. While Etaoin Shrdlu looks like somebody’s name, it is actually a letter sequence produced by running the finger down the first two vertical rows of the old Linotype machine keyboards. The order of letters in Etaoin Shrdlu is determined by what was perceived to be the frequency that each letter appeared in print, with e being the most ubiquitous member of the alphabet.

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

Euphemism. Prudishness enjoyed (if that’s the word) its golden age in the straitlaced Victorian era. Take the widely read Lady Gough’s Book of Etiquette. Among Lady Gough’s social pronouncements was that under no circumstances should books written by male authors be placed on shelves next to books written by “authoresses.” Married writers, however, such as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, could be shelved together without impropriety.

So delicate were Victorian sensibilities that members of polite society would blush at the mention of anything physical. Instead of being pregnant, women were in a delicate condition, in a family way, eating for two, or expectant. Women did not “give birth”; they experienced “a blessed event.” Their children were not “born”; rather, the little strangers were “brought by the stork,” “came into the world,” or “saw the light of day.”

Such words and expressions are called euphemisms. From Greek, a euphemism is literally “the practice” (-ism) of using happy (eu-) speech (pheme).” A euphemism is a mild, indirect word or phrase used in place of one that is more harsh or direct or that may have an unpleasant, distasteful connotation. A euphemism is calling a spade a heart—or telling it like it isn’t.

In the Victorian Age, euphemisms extended even to animals and things. Bull was considered an indecent word, and the proper substitute was “he cow,” “male cow,” or (gasp!) “gentleman cow.” Victorian standards were so exacting that Victorians couldn’t refer to something as vulgar as “legs.” Ladies and gentlemen of that era had to call them “limbs,” even when talking about the legs on a piano; they went so far as to cover up piano legs with little skirts. It’s not surprising, then, that Victorians never requested something as shocking as a leg or breast of chicken; they asked for “a drumstick” or “dark meat” or “light meat.”

At a Richmond, Virginia, reception in his honor, Winston Churchill, then a Member of Parliament, was served cold fried chicken along with the champagne. When he reached the buffet table, the great man asked his hostess for a breast. The woman, a lady of considerable Victorian sensibility and maternal endowment, gently chided him: “We southern ladies use the term ‘white meat.’”

The day after the event, the ever-chivalrous Churchill sent his hostess a corsage, with a card attached: “I hope you will display these flowers on your delicate white meat.”

The opposite of a euphemism is a dysphemism, the intentional use of harsh, rather than polite, language, as in calling one’s spouse the old man or the ball and chain, labeling postal letters and packages snail mail, or referring to dying as croaking.

(See DOUBLESPEAK, FIRED, GOBBLEDYGOOK, HORSEFEATHERS, ZOUNDS.)

Expediency. What characteristic do the following words share: any, arty, beady, cagey, cutie, decay, easy, empty, envy, essay, excel, excess, icy, ivy, kewpie, seedy, and teepee? Turns out that each word is cobbled from the sounds of two letters—NE, RT, BD, KG, QT, DK, EZ, MT, NV, SA, XL, XS, IC, IV, QP, CD, and TP. Such words are labeled grammagrams.

Gaze upon some three-syllable grammagrams:

cesium (CZM)

devious (DVS)

effendi (FND)

enemy (NME)

envious (NVS)

escapee (SKP)

odious (ODS)

opium (OPM)

tedious (TDS)

And behold grammagrams of four syllables:

anemone (NMNE)	Arcadian (RKDN)
eminency (MNNC)	excellency (XLNC)

Finally, I introduce the three longest grammagrams—the pentasyllabic effeminacy (FMNSE), expediency (XPDNC), and obediency (OBDNC).

Here’s a swatch of letter-perfect verse, with accompanying translation. Keep in mind that the same letter twice in a row sounds like a plural. For example, II means “eyes.”

Translation
YURYY	Why you are wise
Is EZ to C	Is easy to see.
U should be called	You should be called
“XLNC.”	“Excellency.”
U XEd NE	You exceed any
MT TT.	Empty tease.
I NV how U	I envy how you
XL with EE.	Excel with ease.

(See REBUS.)

Eye is the only palindromic body part. Eye, I, and aye are all homophones, yet each starts with a different letter.

When it comes to words and phrase origins, the eyes have it:

• Daisy was created in Old English from the poetical “day’s eye.” The flower is indeed a metaphor waiting to be born, with its sunburst center, its radiating white petals, and its sensitivity to the progress of the day, opening during the sunny hours and closing in the evening and extinguishing its brightness. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer, without benefit of any linguistic manual, referred to the sun as “the day’s eye, or else the eye of day.”
• Daylights is timeworn slang for the human eyes, dating back to at least the early eighteenth century. This makes a certain amount of sense since the eyes are the “source” of all the light we see. The practice of equating the eyes with lights or windows is even older; one Latin word for eye was lumen, meaning “light.” “To beat (or scare) the daylights out of” someone first meant to pummel or frighten him or her so badly that the person’s eyes, at least figuratively, popped out.
• Have you heard about the cross-eyed teacher? She couldn’t control her pupils. That pun plays on the two meanings of the word pupil. The first, “a student,” is borrowed from the Latin pupillus, “orphan, ward, minor.” A second meaning boasts the more enchanting etymology: In ancient Rome, the pupilla, “little doll,” was a diminutive of pupa, “girl.” When the Romans looked deep into each other’s eyes, they used the same word for the tiny dolllike images of themselves reflected there. They called the part of the eye that the image could be seen in the pupil.
• The adjective supercilious, literally “with raised eyebrows,” comes from the Latin super, “above,” and cilium, “eyelid” or “eyebrow.” A supercilious person is one who shows arrogance by figuratively or literally raising an eyebrow.
• An autopsy—Greek autós , “self” + opsy , “eye”—is an examination of a dead person in which the coroner sees with his or her own eyes.
• Iris was originally the Greek word for “rainbow” and the goddess of rainbows and messenger of the gods. Later her name was applied to the colorful flower and to the thin, circular structure in our eyes that gives them color.
• Window started out as “the wind’s eye,” a feature of a home that would let out the eye-stinging smoke and odor of bodies and damp fur.

(See FINGER, HAND, HUMERUS, HYSTERICAL.)