I. What is the shortest word in the English language? Any letter of the alphabet qualifies as a word, but a, I, and o are also words with meanings other than designations for letters. An argument can be made that I is the shortest word among these because it is the skinniest. In fact, the reason that the dot was added to the lowercase i and the I was capitalized when used as a pronoun is that the letter was so small and skinny that it looked like a stray speck on the page.
I am here to tell you that English is the only major language to capitalize its first-person singular pronoun. Some observers believe that such capitalization brings about a linguistic ethnocentrism, a sort of “beauty is in the I of the beholder” complex. As evidence, I stands at the top of the list of English words most frequently spoken.
Now that you know the shortest word in English, what is the shortest sentence? The answer is “I am”—only three letters.
And now that you know the shortest sentence in English, what is the longest sentence? The answer is “I do.”
(See A, EXPEDIENCY, I, Q-TIPS, S, SILENT, W, X.)
Idiot. The original Greek meaning of the word idiótēs 
was not nearly as harsh and judgmental as our modern sense. Long before the psychologists got hold of the word, the Greeks used idiótēs, from the root idiós, “one’s own, personal, private,” as in idiom and idiosyncrasy, to designate those who did not hold public office. Because such people possessed no special status or skill, the word idiot gradually fell into disrepute.
The vote that we cast is really a “vow” or “wish.” And this is the precise meaning of the Latin votum. People in our society who fail to exercise their democratic privilege of voting on election day are sometimes called idiots.
(See CANDIDATE, FILIBUSTER, GERRYMANDER, INAUGURATE, OK, OSTRACIZE, POLITICS.)
Inaugurate literally means “to take omens from the flight of birds.” In ancient Rome, augurs would predict the outcome of an enterprise by the way the birds were flying. These soothsayer-magicians would tell a general whether or not to march or to do battle by the formations of the birds on the wing. They might even catch one and cut it open to observe its entrails for omens. Nowadays, presidential candidates use their inauguration speeches to take flight on an updraft of words, rather than birds—and they do often spill their guts for all to see.
(See CANDIDATE, FILIBUSTER, GERRYMANDER, IDIOT, OK, OSTRACIZE, POLITICS.)
Indivisibility. The i’s have it. The vowel i is repeated more frequently in single words than any other letter, such as in the four-i’ed civilizing, infinitive, and initiation; the five-fed initializing, invincibility, and invisibility; and the six-i’d indivisibility. There are those who would catch your eyes with seven i’s in indivisibilities, a word that strikes me as jerry built and jury rigged.
The letter s clearly wins the prize for frequency of a consonant, showing up five times in the likes of assesses, six times in possessiveness, and eight times in possessionlessness.
Here’s a parade of the other twenty-four letters, with examples of words in which each letter pops up and out most frequently. Note how j, q, v, and x don’t like hanging out with their own kind:
B: babble (3)
C: concupiscence (4)
D: fuddy-duddy (5)
E: beekeeper (5)
F: riffraff (4)
G: giggling (4)
H: hashish (3)
J: jejune (2)
K: knickknack (4)
L: hillbilly (4)
M: mammogram (4)
N: nonintervention (5)
O: photocomposition (5)
P: pepper-upper (5)
Q: quinquennial (2)
R: referrer (4)
T: statuette (4)
U: muumuu (4)
V: valve (2)
W: powwow (3)
X: executrix (2)
Y: syzygy (3)
Z: pizzazz (4)
Another five-n word is inconveniencing, in which all the n’s appear three letters away from each other.
(See DEEDED, MISSISSIPPI, SLEEVELESSNESS.)
Infantry. If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? Chuckle chuckle, snort snort—but we are led to ask what is the relationship, if any, between infants and infantry?
Infant was born from the Latin in-, “not” + fari, “speak” = “one who is not yet capable of speech.” In Italian, infante came to mean “boy” or “foot soldier”; hence, our word infantry.
Infinite means “immeasurably large.” Add the five letters simal and you get infinitesimal—a word that means “immeasurably small.” Thus, you make the word greater to make it smaller.
Inflammable. Derived from the French enflamer, inflammable used to appear as a warning meaning “Don’t light a match here.” Despite the fact that nobody was befuddled by the adjective inflammatory, a number of unfortunate souls, seeing inflammable as a fuel tank label, reasoned that the in- meant “not” and was thus the equivalent of “incombustible.” As a result, flammable has been adopted, with its clear meaning “combustible,” and is opposed by the equally clear nonflammable. But inflammable survives, so that flammable and inflammable now mean the same thing.
Flammable and inflammable are the two most notorious examples of apparent opposites that turn out to mean the same thing, but they are not alone: A slim chance and a fat chance are the same, as are a caregiver and a caretaker, a good licking and a bad licking, passive and impassive, heritable and inheritable, and What’s going on? and What’s coming off?
This whole business of opposition and sameness makes the head spin and the mind boggle. How can sharp speech and blunt speech be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? How can quite a lot and quite a few be the same, while overlook and oversee are opposites?
If button and unbutton and tie and untie are opposites, why are loosen and unloosen and ravel and unravel the same? How can invaluable objects be more valuable than valuable ones? And why are pertinent and impertinent, canny and uncanny, and famous and infamous neither opposites nor the same?
(See DISGRUNTLED.)
Intestines is the most logologically exciting of all body components. Its first five letters are an anagram of its second five, and both halves are anagrams of the word inset. With its letter order intact, testes hides inside intestines.
(See ARM, ELBOW, EYE, HOTSHOTS, RESTAURATEURS, SET, SHANGHAIINGS.)
Iota, the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet, is the name for what we call the letter i. Because that letter is so thin, the word has come to signify the smallest of things, a jot. Iota is also a rare four-letter word crammed with three syllables. Choice lowercase examples include area, aria, idea, oleo, and olio. Capital examples include Oreo, Iowa, Iona, Oahu, and Ohio.
(See AGUE, RODE.)
Irony is a rhetorical and literary device that involves an incongruity between two elements. You can’t have too many ironies in the fire:
Verbal irony is an incongruity between what is said and what is meant. Bayed about by his enemies, Marc Antony praises those who have assassinated Julius Caesar as “honorable men. So are they all, all honorable men.” Gradually, and too late for Caesar’s killers to intercede, the Roman rabble come to see that Antony really means that Brutus and his co-conspirators are the opposite of honorable men.
Situational irony exploits a discrepancy between what we expect and what happens in a work of art. It is ironic that the oiler, the strongest of the men in Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat,” is the one who drowns while the others, weaker and sicker, survive. It is ironic that Edwin Arlington Robinson’s rich and shining Richard Cory “one calm summer night, / went home and put a bullet through his head.”
The heartrending, gut-wrenching gulf between what we know and what a literary character knows is dramatic irony—watching that character advance toward and walk off a cliff and not being able to cry out and help. We know well before Oedipus discovers it that he has married Jocasta, the girl just like the girl who married dear old dad. We know well before Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet about the sleeping potion and poison sword that will extinguish their young lives. But we cannot help them.
Now that you know that irony is a discrepancy that illuminates the human condition, please don’t use ironic to mean a simple coincidence. It is ironic that a nation of our wealth should also incarcerate the highest percentage of prisoners in the world. That on the street the other day I happened to bump into a superannuated classmate from elementary school is in no way ironic; it’s just coincidental.
(See CHIASMUS, HYSTERON PROTERON, METAPHOR, METONYMY, OXYMORON, PARADOX, ZEUGMA.)
Irregardless may be the word that, aside from dirty, sexist, and racist terms, lands you in the deepest and most scalding hot water. Irregardless is a semiliterate blend of irrespective and regardless and is inhabited by the two-headed Hydra of ir- and -less, two negativeaffixes. Use irregardless in speech or (gasp!) in print, and you will not reap the full fruits of English-speaking civilization. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, disirregardless of what the permissive grammarians say.