Napoleon. What do you get when you throw a bomb into a recreation room? Linoleum blown apart.

On a more serious note, gaze upon the palindromic sentence that Napoleon uttered as he paced the shores of the island of Elba in 1814:

Elba Fable

“Able was I ere I saw Elba,”

Napoleon cried like a toy-deprived kid.

Wellington mocked in reply, “Did I

Disable Elba’s id? I did!”

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

Nerd. When we think about inventions, we conjure up visions of the wheel, the sail, and the electric light—artifacts that humankind has not always possessed. Words are such an integral part of our consciousness that we believe that they have always existed, like stones and grass and trees. But words are more like weaving and flint tools. Each new word is inventively spoken or written for the very first time by a particular human being at a particular moment.

Although the identities of most of these wordmakers are lost in the mist of history, we do know who were the creators of a number of neologisms (“new words”). Many of these neologizers are novelists, playwrights, poets, and essayists who are gifted with a keen ear for language, who love to play with words, and who record their fanciful fabrications in print.

We know, for example, that nerd first appears in print in 1950 in the Dr. Seuss children’s book If I Ran the Zoo. Therein a boy named Gerald McGrew makes a great number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do if he were in charge at the zoo. Among these fanciful schemes is:

And then just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo

And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO,

A NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!

The accompanying illustration for NERD shows a grumpy Seuss creature with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt—not terribly nerdlike. For whatever reasons, it-kutch, preep, proo, and nerkle have never been enshrined in any dictionary.

In addition to the lexical creations of Joseph Heller, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, James Barrie, L. Frank Baum, John Milton, Sir Thomas Moore, and William Shakespeare, discussed elsewhere, here’s a list of ten authors who have contributed neologisms (“new words”) to our language, who have sculpted significance from air and changed the world by changing the word:

• William Tyndale	scapegoat	1530
• Ben Jonson	diary	1581
• John Dryden	witticism	1677
• Jonathan Swift	yahoo	1726
• Thomas Jefferson	belittle	1797
• Washington Irving	almighty dollar	1836
• Harriet Beecher Stowe	underground railway	1852
• Herman Melville	Americana	1886
• Karel Capek	robot	1921
• Stephen Potter	gamesmanship	1947

(See CATCH-22, CHARACTONYM, CHORTLE, DOGHOUSE, OZ, PANDEMONIUM, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.)

No. What English word seems to you the most useful to the language? Back in 1931, that question was put to a small panel of eminent novelists, poets, critics, humorists, and educators.

Some of the respondents reasoned that our most useful word must be one of the ten English words most frequently used in conversations, as determined by the word counts of that day. On the basis of frequency alone, the was considered our most useful word. Turning to meaning, the panel offered bread, do, eat, fix, help, man, and thing.

But the greatest number of panelists chose no as the most useful word in the English language. It’s probably no coincidence that no is the first word uttered by more than 50 percent of the world’s English-speaking population.

Nonsupports. Here we have the longest word (eleven letters) cobbled entirely of letters from the second half of the alphabet. Untrustworthy (thirteen letters) is a frustrating near miss because we can’t get the h out of there. (Actually, untrustworthy is a near hit because a near miss is a hit.)

Soupspoons and the hyphenated topsy-turvy are common ten-letter, second-half-of-the-alphabet words.

(See CABBAGE.)

Nother. We hear (seldom see) this “word” only in expressions such as “That’s a whole nother matter” and “That’s a whole nother ballgame.” What is going on here?

Here’s what I think. Our English language features a great number of prefixes, such as pre- as in prewar and suffixes, such as -ness, as in goodness. Rarely do we encounter infixes, meaning-bearing elements that occupy the middle of a word. When we do, they tend to be naughty, as in the British, absobloodylutely!, and the American unprintables—“I’ll guarang__d__tee you” and “That’s inf__ingcredible!”

So in my view, in “a whole nother ballgame,” whole is a rare English infix that sits in the middle of the word another.

Nth is the best of the one-syllable words that do not include any of the major vowels, a, e, i, o, or u! In this game you just can’t buy a vowel.

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, some call these words that have had a vowel movement “abstemious” words, a facetious label since abstemious (along with facetious) is stuffed with every major vowel, and in sequence:

by, cry, crypt(s), cyst(s), dry(ly), fly, flyby, fry, glyph(s), gym(s), gyp(s), gypsy, hymn(s), lymph(s), lynch, lynx, my, myrrh, myth(s), nymph(s), ply, pry, pygmy, rhythm(s), shy(ly), sky, sly(ly), spry(ly), spy, sty, sylph(s), synch(s), thy, try, tryst(s), why(s), and wry(ly).

One three-syllable word also avoids the major vowels—syzygy, which means “the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies.” Syzygy is an especially appropriate spelling for such a heavenly three-syllable word.

But nth, as in “the nth degree,” is triumphantly abstemious because it contains no vowel at all.

A Sonnet to Abstemious Words

Once did a shy but spry gypsy
Spy a pygmy, who made him feel tipsy.
Her form, like a lynx, sylph, and nymph,
Made all his dry glands feel quite lymph.

He felt so in synch with her rhythm
That he hoped she’d fly to the sky with him.
No sly myth would he try on her;
Preferring to ply her with myrrh.

When apart, he would fry and then cry,
Grow a cyst and a sty in his eye.
That’s why they would tryst at the gym,
By a crypt, where he’d write a wry hymn.

Her he loved to the nth degree,
Like a heavenly syzygy.

Now that you’re wise to the y’s, ask yourself if any other words cavort across the stage of language without spotting any a, e, i, o, or u — or the minor vowels y or w.

Hmm. That’s one that you can find in some dictionaries, including Scrabble lexicons. I’m not including initialisms, such as TV and Ph.D.

Shh. Before you grab some z’s, give me some time to think. There, you’ve just spotted another two, along with brr, pfft, and tsk-tsk.

I sincerely hope that these abstemious words have pleased you, not just to the first, fifth, or tenth degree, but (and embedded in the poem above) to the nth degree!

(See RHYTHMS.)

Nuclear. Reverse the first two letters and you get unclear.

What is clear is that the pronunciation noo-kyuh-lur has received much notoriety because a number of presidents, from Dwight David Eisenhower to George W. Bush, have sounded the word that way. The late broadcaster and language commentator Edwin Newman wrote: “The word, correctly pronounced, is too much for a fair part of the population, and education and experience seem to have nothing to do with it.”

Noo-kyuh-lur is an example of metathesis, the transposition of internal sounds, as in Ree-luh-tur for Realtor, joo-luh-ree for jewelry, hunderd for hundred, lahr-niks for larynx, and, more subtly, cumfter-bull for comfortable and Wends-day for Wednesday. While the metatheses cumf-ter-bull (in which the r and the t have been transposed) and Wends-day (in which the n and the d have been switched) are fully acceptable and entrenched in our language, cultivated speakers generally consider noo-kyuh-lur, Ree-luh-tur, and their ilk to be atrocities.

From Eisenhower (who simply “could not get it right,” wrote journalist Edwin Newman) to George W. Bush, noo-kyuh-lur has never stopped raising hackles and igniting jeers. The San Diego Union-Tribune recently polled its readers to find out the grammar and pronunciation abuses that most seismically yanked their chains and rattled their cages. Noo-kyuh-lur was the crime against English mentioned by the greatest number of respondents.

Despite its proliferation, noo-kyuh-lur has failed to gain respectability. Noo-kyuh-lur may be a sad fact of life, but resistance to it is hardly a lost cause. Although we hear it from some prominent people, it remains a much-derided aberration.

Nut. During a fund drive for WNYC public radio, I fielded questions from New York’s finest listeners. At some point, host Leonard Lopate pitched this line: “It costs this station almost $700,000 a year to buy all the national programs you hear each weekend. That’s a really big nut to make.”

Sure enough, a listener called in to ask the origin of making the nut. I love questions like that because I get my audio radiance from my radio audience, and I explained to the listener that when a circus came to town, the sheriff would often remove the nut from a wheel of the main wagon. Because in bygone days these nuts were elaborately and individually crafted, they were well-nigh impossible to replace. Thus, the circus couldn’t leave town until the costs of land and utilities rental, easements, and security were paid. It’s but a short metaphorical leap to the modern meaning of making the nut, “meeting one’s expenses.”

(See CIRCUS, METAPHOR.)