Ulysses Simpson Grant and Rutherford Birchard Hayes are the only presidential names that contain a, e, i, o, and u with a y to boot.

• Eisenhower is the only presidential surname that contains four syllables.
• Nixon. Reverse the last two letters and you get a double negative—nix no.
• Obama is the only presidential surname that begins with O and that begins and ends with a vowel.
• Pierce, Grant, Ford, Bush, Carter, and (in Britain) Hoover are all common words when uncapitalized.
• Roosevelt, Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt are presidential surnames containing oo. All these men occupied the Oval Office in the twentieth century, three of them sequentially.
• James Madison is the only president whose first and last names alternate between consonants and vowels.
• Rutherford B. Hayes’s first name contains the last name of Gerald Ford. Andrew and Lyndon Johnson’s last name contains the first name of four other presidents—Adams, Quincy Adams, Tyler, and Kennedy. The middle names of Ronald Wilson Reagan and William Jefferson Clinton match the last names of two of their predecessors.

(See OK, WASHINGTON.)

Uncopyrightable. An isogram is a single word in which no letter of the alphabet appears more than once—an iso(lated pan)gram. Among fairly common English words, the fifteen-letter uncopyrightable is the longest. In uncopyrightable each major vowel plus y appears once and only once.

The less familiar dermatoglyphics (the science of skin patterns, especially fingerprints) also sports fifteen letters. Ambidextrously is a satisfying fourteen-letter isogram; it too contains each major vowel plus y.

The longest isographic duo is blacksmith-gunpowdery (twenty letters), the longest trio (twenty-two letters) frowzy-humpbacks-tingled, which is also a plausible sentence.

(See FACETIOUS, METALIOUS, PANGRAM, SEQUOIA, ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT, UNNOTICEABLY.)

Underground. It’s shockingly easy to turn your mentor into your tormentor: Simply clone the tor at the end and graft the offspring on to the beginning of the word. Even more subtly, buried in underground are the letters und at both the beginning and the end. And, if you accept undergrounder as a word, you have an entity beginning and ending with under.

Many other words begin and end with the same trigram, including:

antioxidant

bedaubed

entertainment

ionization

mesdames

microcosmic

rediscovered

restores

(See HOTSHOTS.)

United. In an installment of Johnny Hart’s comic strip B.C., one caveman screams at another, “No, no, no, no! I distinctly said to gird your loins!” The other cave guy has drawn a grid on a lion. The humor of this episode arises from the fact that a number of words transform into other words when two adjacent letters are switched—trial/trail, diary/dairy, silver/sliver, closets/closest, infraction/infarction, and, of course gird/grid and loins/lions.

With the same interchange of neighboring letters, united becomes its opposite—untied. Complaint and compliant form near opposites, as do sacred and scared. Depending on your point of view, marital and martial may be antonyms or synonyms.

(See LATCHES, MENTALLY.)

Up. It’s time to catch up on up, the ever-present two-letter word that may have more meanings than any other and, at times, no meaning at all. It’s easy to understand up when it means skyward or toward the top of a list. And clearly there are crucial differences between call and call up and beat and beat up. But I have to wonder why we warm ourselves up, why we speak up, why we shower up, why a topic comes up, and why we crack up at a joke.

Let’s face up to it: We’re all mixed up about up. Usually the little word is totally unnecessary. Why do we light up a cigar, lock up the house, polish up the silverware, and fix up the car when we can more easily and concisely light, lock, polish, and fix them?

At times, verbs with up attached mess up our heads and screw up our minds with bewildering versatility. To look up a chimney means one thing, to look up a friend another, to look up to a friend yet another, to look up a word something else. We can make up a bed, a story, a test, our face, and our mind, and each usage has a completely different meaning.

At other times, up-verbs are unabashedly ambiguous. When we wind up our watch, we start it; when we wind up a meeting, we stop it. When we hold up our partners on the tennis court, are we supporting or hindering them? How, pray tell, can we walk up and down the aisle at the same time and slow up and slow down at the same time?

What bollixes up our language worse than anything else is that up can be downright misleading. A house doesn’t really burn up; it burns down. We don’t really throw up; we throw out and down. We don’t pull up a chair; we pull it along. Most of us don’t add up a column of figures; we add them down.

And why it is that we first chop down a tree, and then we chop it up?

Maybe it’s time to give up on the uppity up.