Tad. Biologically, a tadpole is a larval amphibian. Etymologically, tadpole is formed from the Middle English tode, “toad” + polle, “head” because a tadpole looks like a toad that is all head, with the limbs to grow out later. The clipped form tad swam into American English around 1915 with the meaning “a small amount,” as in “a tad of sugar” and “a tad chilly.”
(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CAPER, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)
Tantalize. One of the vilest of villains in Greek mythology’s was King Tantalus, who served the body of his young son to the gods. They soon discovered the king’s wicked ruse, restored the dead boy to life, and devised a punishment to fit the crime. They banished the king to Hades, where he is condemned to stand in a sparkling pool of water with boughs of luscious fruit overhead; when he stoops to drink, the water drains away through the bottom of the pool, and when he wishes to eat, the branches of fruit sway just out of his grasp. Ever since, when something presents itself temptingly to our view, we say that we are tantalized.
(See CLUE, ECHO, JOVIAL, WEDNESDAY.)
Taxicab is the best example of a redundant word, in which the two halves of a word mean exactly the same thing. Other specimens include bunny rabbit, forefront, oleomargarine, Ouija, pussycat, soda pop, sum total, and tabby cat.
(See REDUNDANCY.)
Temp is the best of “pseudo-comparatives”—words that can add both an -er and -est but that don’t relate at all to true comparisons of adjectives. That is, the triad of temp/temper/tempest looks like the small/smaller/smallest adjective model, but it isn’t a true progression of adjectives. Other examples: be/beer/beest; hon/honer/honest; mole/ molar/molest, p/per/pest, and pry/prior/priest. Deter/detest and infer/ infest are the ultimate heartbreakers—comparatives and superlatives, but with no basewords.
(See SLAY.)
Temperamentally. Medieval philosophers believed that four qualities—hot, cold, moist, and dry—coalesced in varying quantities to form the nature of things. The Latin word for this mixture was temperamentum; if anyone became temperamental, the mixture was apparently a bubble off plumb.
In addition, the word temperamentally is a blazing sun in the heavens of letter play. I say that because it’s the densest example of a snowball word, one that can be cleft into one-, two-, three-, four-, and five letter words: t em per amen tally.
(See ALKALINE, DAREDEVIL, MARSHALL, SLEEVELESS.)
Thai. In the triad Thai, thigh, and thy, the first two letters of each word are spelled the same but sounded differently, while the remaining letters are each spelled differently but pronounced the same—eye.
Therein. Lurking in therein are ten words with letters adjacent and in order:
| the | there | here | herein | re |
| he | her | ere | rein | in |
(See BLOSSOM.)
Thingamabob. When we don’t know what something is called, we have at least thirty synonyms to identify “that object I don’t know the name for”:
dingus
doofunny
dohickey
dojigger
dojiggy
domajig
domajigger
doodad
dowhackey
flumadiddle
gigamaree
gimmick
gizmo
hickey
hootenanny
hootmalalie
jigger
such-and-such
thingamabob
thingamadoodle
thingamajig
thingamajigger
thingamaree
thingammy
thingum
thingy
whatzy
whatchamacallit
whatzit
widget
(See ZARF.)
Thunder. The English poet and playwright John Dennis is best known for first sneering, “A pun is the lowest form of wit.” In 1709, Dennis’s tragedy, Appius and Virginia, turned out to be a tragic failure among critics and playgoers alike. The play bombed even though Dennis had invented for it a device that generated the roaring of thunder as part of the staging.
Shortly after the premature closing of Dennis’s play, Shakespeare’s Macbeth came to London. Dennis attended an early performance, where he heard his own thunder machine roar during the three witches’ opening scene on the heath. The upstaged Dennis exclaimed: “My God! The villains will not play my play, but they will steal my thunder!” And that’s where we get the expression “to steal my thunder,” meaning “to be robbed of deserved glory.”
(See KEYNOTE, METAPHOR, SLAPSTICK.)
Time. William Shakespeare spoke of people who “run before the clock,” as if the hands of the clock would sweep them away if they did not hustle their bustles. In the English-speaking world so many of us seem to be working harder and taking fewer and shorter vacations. The Oxford English Corpus list of word frequencies confirms that obsession with time and productivity by revealing that time is the most frequently used noun in our language. Year is ranked third, day fifth, work sixteenth, and week seventeenth.
In his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” the English poet Andrew Marvell wrote, “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” According to the Oxford English Corpus frequency list, time’s winged chariot is running us over.
Time is also a perfect anagram, a word whose letters can be juggled so that each new word begins with a different letter from the original word: “Now is the time to emit information about an item that may help you a mite.”
Have you ever noted how ambiguous are statements that involve time?
It’s amazing that we English speakers ever get any place on time.
Toast. In the days of Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, people would place slices of spiced toast into their tankards of ale or glasses of wine to improve the flavor and remove the impurities. The drink itself became a “toast,” as did the gesture of drinking to another’s good health.
Centuries later, an eastern farmer in the United States who had decided to move west would stop by the local tavern to say good-bye to friends and neighbors. They would toast him with Here’s mud in your eye, which meant “May you find soft, rich, dark, and moist soil that will be thrown up as specks of mud as you plow it.”
(See CAKEWALK, COMPANION, COUCH POTATO, HOAGIE, PUMPERNICKEL, SALARY, SANDWICH.)
Towhead. This form of tow descends from an Old English word that means “flax.” A towhead is a youngster—usually male, but not necessarily so—with white or pale yellow hair the color of flax. Avoid confusing tow with toe, as in this newspaper photo caption “Linda Tinyon clutched her toe-headed son during the storm.” Even worse: “Linda Tinyon clutched her two-headed son during the storm.”
(See BLOOPER.)
Triskaidekaphobia. Do you have an undomesticated phobia? No? Think again. Does your stomach want to scream when it and you arrive at the zenith of a Ferris wheel? Does your head retract turtlelike into your body when the lightning flashes and the thunder cracks? Do you tremble at the sight of a snake or a rat or a spider or a cockroach?
Humankind is beset with a host of fears and has managed to assign names to more than a thousand of them. Phobos, “fear,” was the son of Ares, the god of war, and was the nephew of Eris, goddess of discord, and brother to Deimos, “dread.” The names of our deepest dreads generally include the Greek root phobíā 
, “fear or hatred,” affixed to another Greek root. The two most common fears are acrophobia, a morbid fear of heights, and claustrophobia, a morbid fear of enclosed spaces. Things could be worse. Count your blessings that you aren’t stuck with pantophobia—the morbid fear of everything.
Among this class of fears that go bump in our minds, my favorites include triskaidekaphobia: fear of the number thirteen (tris, “three” + kai, “and” + deka, “ten” + phobia, “fear”); pentheraphobia: fear of your mother-in-law; pteronophobia: fear of being tickled by feathers; and—I’m not making this up—arachibutyrophobia: the dread of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.
When Franklin Roosevelt declaimed, in his 1933 inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was warning against phobophobia, the fear of being afraid. Knowing that all our terrors have names may be a kind of magic that helps us to hold them at bay and to experience less fear about fear itself.
Trivia is borrowed from the Latin word spelled the same way and composed of tri, “three” + via, “roads” = “the place where three roads meet.” At such crosswords, travelers would exchange idle chitchat and stories; whence and hence, the current meaning, “commonplace things of little or no importance.”
Trivium took on a more metaphorical significance in the Middle Ages, when it referred to the three roads to knowledge—grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Rounding out the liberal arts was the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Writer James Joyce is said to have said, “My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial.”
Turkey. Centuries ago, the Pilgrims found in America a wild fowl somewhat similar in appearance to a guinea fowl they had known back in England, a fowl that acquired its name because it was first imported by way of Turkey. As the (probably apocryphal) tale spins out, back in the early colonial days, a white hunter and a friendly Native American made a pact before they started out on the day’s hunt. Whatever they bagged was to be divided equally between them. At the end of the day, the white man undertook to distribute the spoils, consisting of several buzzards and turkeys. He suggested to his fellow hunter, “Either I take the turkeys and you the buzzards, or you take the buzzards and I take the turkeys.” At this point the Native American complained, “You talk buzzard to me. Now talk turkey.” And ever since, to talk turkey has meant “to tell it like it is.”
(See BIKINI, BUFFALO, CANARY, CAPER, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, HAMBURGER, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)
Typewriter. When we seek to find the longest word that can be typed on a single horizontal row of a standard typewriter keyboard, we naturally place our fingers on the top row of letters—qwertyuiop—because five of the seven vowels reside there. From that single row we can type seven ten-letter words: pepperroot, pepperwort, peppertree, perpetuity, proprietor, repertoire, and—ta da!—typewriter.