Facetious. What did one of the poet A. E. Housman’s debtors write to him?: “AE: IOU.” The shortest (nine letters) and most accessible word that contains all five major vowels in sequence is facetious. AEIOU words that test the outer limits of the English language include abstemious, abstentious, acheilous, acheirous, adventitious, aparecious, areious (the shortest), annelidous, arsenious, arterious, atenisodus, bacterious, caesious, fracedinous, lamelligomphus (the longest), lateriporous, and parecious.
The five major vowels each appear once in alphabetic order in the words lawn tennis court.
Unnoticeably is the shortest word (eleven letters) that contains the major vowels in reverse order, each occurring only once. Other exhibits include subcontinental and uncomplimentary, at fifteen letters the longest such word.
(See AMBIDEXTROUS, METALIOUS, SEQUOIA, ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT, UNCOPYRIGHTABLE.)
Fathom. When we try to fathom an idea, we are making poetic use of an old word that originally meant “the span between two outstretched arms.” Then it came to mean “a unit of six feet used for measuring the depth of water.” By poetic extension, the verb to fathom now means “to get to the bottom of” something, and that something doesn’t have to be the ocean.
(See DOLDRUMS, METAPHOR.)
Filibuster. I love the sounds of words like whippersnapper, persnickety, flibbertigibbet, and filibuster. The last of these words is borrowed from the Dutch vrijbuiter, “freebooter,” which first meant “pirate, adventurer” in English. That sense is retained in the current denotation of filibuster: “holding a piece of legislation captive by making long and windy speeches.”
I have a special interest in Dutch words that have sailed into our language because I am married to Simone van Egeren, my Dutch treat, born in Rotterdam. My time with Simone has been a succession of saucy Holland days.
When the Dutch came to the New World, the figure of St. Nikolaas, their patron saint, was on the first ship. The pronunciation of St. Nikolaas became folk etymologized, and the English in New York heard their Dutch neighbors saying Sinterklaas. They recognized the Dutch name Klaas and thought they were hearing “Santa Klaas.” After the Dutch lost control of New Amsterdam to the English in the seventeenth century, Sinterklaas gradually became anglicized into Santa Claus and acquired some of the features of the British Father Christmas.
It is time to cut through the poppycock (from the Dutch pappekak, “soft dung”) by noting the enormous contributions that the Dutch language has made to our English tongue. A partial list of gifts from our Netherfriends embraces barracks, bedspread, boodle, boor, booze, boss, boy, brandy, bully, bulwark, bumpkin, buoy, bush, caboose, coleslaw, cookie, cruise, cruller, cuspidor, date, deck, decoy, dingus, dope, dumb, excise, furlough, gas, gin, golf, groove, halibut, hay, hobble, hop (plant), hose (stockings), huckster, husk, hustle, jib, kit, knapsack, landscape, loiter, luck, mangle, mart, pickle, pit (in fruit), placard, rack, school (of fish), scow, skate, sketch, sled, sleigh, sloop, slur, smuggle, snap, snatch, snoop, snort, snow, snuff, splint, spook, spool, stoker, stoop (porch), tackle (fishing), uproar, waffle, wagon, walrus, wiseacre, and yawl.
(See BOSS, CANDIDATE, IDIOT, INAUGURATE, POLITICS.)
Finger entered our language through a very old Germanic etymon that means “one in five.” “Hold on,” you might object. “The thumb is not a finger, so a finger can’t be one in five.” Au contraire. The just-about-as-old Old English ancestor to thumb, thuma, meant “swollen finger.”
Despite what you may read on the Internet, the phrase rule of thumb has nothing to do with any law enjoining a husband from using a stick thicker than his thumb to beat his wife.
What a horrible thought!
Rule of thumb actually harks back to days of old, when rulers of the measuring kind were uncommon and woodworkers used the length of the thumb from the knuckle to the tip as an approximate measure of one inch—inexact, but better than nothing. Nowadays, “rule of thumb” signifies any rough-and-ready method of estimating.
We can put our finger on prestidigitator. As impressive as that word looks and sounds, its derivation is quite simple, from the Italian presto, “nimble,” and the Latin digitus, “finger.” A prestidigitator radiates the illusion of possessing magical powers through skill with his or her quick hands.
(See EYE, HAND, HUMERUS, HYSTERICAL.)
Fired. The meaning of fired as “to discharge someone from a job” is an extension of applying fire to gunpowder.
Nobody gets fired anymore. Nowadays, when people lose their jobs, they are “reclassified,” “rightsized,” “deselected,” “outplaced,” “nonpositively terminated,” or any other of dozens of euphemistic verbs that really mean axed, canned, sacked, or given the heave-ho.
In the continuing search for newer, softer, and more ambiguous verbs with which to administer the final blow to helpless jobholders, Laurence Urdang, longtime editor of Verbatim, the Language Quarterly, came up with a new pun game:
If clergymen are defrocked and lawyers are disbarred, then alcoholics are delivered, hairdressers are distressed, manicurists are defiled, models are disposed, and pornographers are deluded.
Employing the de- and dis- prefixes, I offer my own multiple verbs for getting rid of members of other professions:
(See CALIBER, DOUBLESPEAK, PUN.)
First is the only ordinal number whose letters appear in alphabetical order. The only alphabetic cardinal number that matches the alphabetic order of first is forty. A number of other “figure-ative” words do a number on us:
Floccinaucinihilipilification, meaning “the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial,” is a twenty-nine-letter, twelve-syllable word that dates back to 1741. Until 1982, floccinaucinihilipilification was the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary. While it contains nine i’s, it is the longest word devoid of e’s. It also conceals the seven-letter palindrome ilipili.
(See CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUGG, HIPPOPOTOMONSTROSESQUIPEDALIAN, HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS, LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDDROBWLLLLANTYSILOGOGOCH, PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOKONIOSIS, SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS.)
Focus is a Latin word that meant “hearth, fireplace.” As the focal point for life in the Roman home, the place that kept family warm and cooked the family’s food, focus wound up as a word for any place where people or things converge.
Focus is also the focal point of a triple-double homophonic pun:
Have you heard about the man who gave his male offspring a cattle ranch and named it Focus? It was the place where the sun’s rays meet—and the sons raise meat.
Forecastle. A ship’s forecastle is sometimes written as fo’c’s’le, making it the most apostrophied of our words. Just ask the ship’s bo’s’n.