Zarf. Few people know that the holder for a paper cone coffee cup is called a zarf. Here are my favorite thingamabobs that have names you probably never knew existed:

• aglet. The little plastic tip of a shoelace.
• chimb. The rim of a barrel.
• dingbat. A cute little typesetter’s mark or ornament, such as the bullet point to the left of each item in this section.
• escutcheon. The decorative metal plate around a keyhole, drawer pull, or doorknob.
• ferrule. The metal band that holds an eraser to a pencil or the metal tip of an umbrella.
• harp. The small metal hoop that supports a lampshade.
• muntins. The frames for holding window panes.
• neb. The curved end of the handle of a knife.
• pintel. The vertical post that runs through a door hinge.
• punt. The indentation at the bottom of some wine bottles that provides added strength to the vessel but reduces the holding capacity.

(See THINGAMABOB.)

Zeugma. In addition to wanting to fill in and out the “Z” cluster of this book, I love how zeugma sounds and looks. Zeugma , from a Greek word meaning “yoke,” is also one of my favorite figures of rhetoric. Zeugma features the omission of a verb, creating a striking yoking of two nouns:

Or stain her Honor, or her new Brocade …

Or lose her Heart, or necklace at a Ball.

—Alexander Pope

When I am speaking on behalf a large-hearted organization, I sometimes declare zeugmatically, “ABC Charity validates your parking and your humanity.”

Zeugma is one of dozens of figures of speech and rhetoric in the bestiary collected by the ancient Greeks. Among other specimens:

• alliteration. The repetition of initial consonant sounds. Dollars to doughnuts, our English language contains a treasure trove and kit and caboodle of tried-and-true, bright-eyed-and-busy-tailed, bread-and-butter, bigger-and-better, cream-of-the-crop, fit-as-a-fiddle, hale-and-hearty, picture-perfect, shipshape alliterative expressions, all of them good as gold and worth a pretty penny.
• enallage. A rhetorically effective mistake in grammar, as in “We was robbed!”—Jimmy Jacobs; “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
• isolcolon. Parallelism of grammatical forms, as in “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”; “government of the people, by the people, for the people …”—Abraham Lincoln
• litotes. A deliberate understatement that helps make a point, as in “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her appearance.”—Jonathan Swift
• paraprosdokian. Derived from two Greek roots that mean “an unexpected outcome,” this figure of speech is characterized by a surprising left-hand turn at the end of a statement that produces a humorous or dramatic effect, as in “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”—Groucho Marx; “When I die, I want to die like my grandfather did—peacefully in his sleep, not screaming like all the passengers in the car he was driving.”—Bob Monkhouse
• simile. A comparison between two essentially different objects or ideas expressly indicated by words such as like or as, as in “My love is like a red, red rose.”—Robert Burns

  One Judge Martin J. Sheehan of Kenton Circuit Court, Kentucky, rejoiced similitudinously in the settlement of a case that had been scheduled to go to trial earlier:

  And such news of an amicable settlement having made this court happier than a tick on a fat dog because it is otherwise busier than a one-legged cat in a sand box and, quite frankly, would have rather jumped naked off of a twelve-foot step ladder and into a five-gallon bucket of porcupines than have presided over a two-week trial of the herein dispute, a trial which, no doubt, would have made the jury more confused than a hungry baby in a topless bar and made the parties and their attorneys madder than mosquitoes in a mannequin factory. It is therefore ordered and adjudicated by the court that the jury trial scheduled herein for July 13, 2011, is hereby canceled.

• synecdoche. The substitution of a part for the whole, as in “Dad, why don’t Mom and you watch the tube tonight so that I can borrow the wheels?”

(See CHIASMUS, HYSTERON PROTERON, IRONY, METAPHOR, METONYMY, OXYMORON, PARADOX.)

Zoology. Being both a bird watcher and a word botcher, I took my three granddaughters to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, where we attended “Frequent Flyers,” the famous bird show. Our family enjoyed various avians strutting their stuff on the ground, hawks swooping down from the sky, and a gray parrot squawking and squeaking all sorts of sound effects.

In their ongoing narrative, two of the Wild Animal Park’s trainers kept pronouncing the name of the San Diego Zoological Society as ZOO-uh-LAHJ-i-kul society. After the performance, I mentioned to the two young women in private that there are two, not three, o’s in zoological so the proper sounding is ZOH-uh-LAHJ-i-kul. They told me they knew that but had been instructed by their bosses to say ZOO-uh-LAHJ-i-kul because people wouldn’t understand the proper pronunciation. Glug. Talk about the dumbing down of America.

Pronunciation maven Charles Harrington Elster points out that there is no zoo in zoology, no noun in pronunciation, no point in poinsettia, no sick in psychiatrist, no spear in experiment, no wine in genuine or sanguine, no berry in library, no shoe in eschew, no art in arctic, no ant in defendant, no foe in forward and foreword, no pair in comparable, no day in deity, no sea in oceanic, no she in controversial, no punk in pumpkin, no eve in evolution, no pen in penalize, no pitch in picture, no pole in police, no pot in potpourri, no ex in espresso, no Arthur in arthritis, no Bert in sherbet, no sees in species, no deer in idea, no ram in ignoramus, no tang in orangutan, no mitten in badminton, no tie in tyrannical, no lock in lilac, no port in rapport, no beast in bestial, no doe in docile, no beau in boutique, no owner is onerous, no spite in respite, no oh in myopic, no brew in brooch, no over in hover, no reek in recluse, no sewer in connoisseur, no sees in processes, no nix in larynx, no home in homicide, no gal in gala, no mire in admirable, no chick in chic, no click in clique, no me or Lee in melee, no ray in lingerie, no dye in dais, no oral in pastoral, pectoral, electoral, and mayoral, no air in err, no restaurant in restaurateur, no stray in illustrative or menstruation, no spar in disparate, no rounded in drowned, no vice in vice versa, no nominee in ignominy, no mash in machination, no spire in respiratory, no late in prelate, no pray in prelude, no magnet in magnate, no dare in modernity, no eye in Iran and Iraq, no you in jaguar and February, no pew in Pulitzer, no clue in Ku Klux Klan, no Poe in impotent, no cane in Spokane, no cue in coupon and in nuclear, and no anus in Uranus.

ZOONOOZ. Among the many attractions of San Diego, where I am fortunate enough to live, are our zoo and wild animal park. Since 1920 the magazine published by our zoological society has been titled ZOONOOZ. It’s a bedazzling, beguiling, and bewitching name because it’s a palindrome right side up, upside down, and both ways in a mirror:

ZOONOOZ! ZOONOOZ! burning bright

In the forests of the night.

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy dazzling symmetry?

Topsy-turvy words like ZOONOOZ that can retain their appearance upside down are called ambigrams:

dip

dollop

mow

NOON

Pod

suns

SWIMS

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

Zounds. English speakers apparently take deeply to heart the biblical commandment not to take the Lord’s name in vain and Christ’s injunction to eschew all swearing, either by heaven or by earth. Have you ever noticed how many different ways we have come up with to avoid saying God and damnation?: gosh, golly, goodness gracious, good grief, good gravy, by gar, by golly, by gum, dad gum, doggone, gol dang, gol darn, dear me (an approximation of the Italian Dio mio, “my God”), jumpin’ Jehoshaphat (‘jumping Jehovah”), begorrah, great Scott, gosh all fishhooks (“God almighty”), by gorey, by Godfrey, and W.C. Fields’ Godfrey Daniels.

Older and more elegant stratagems for skirting the name of the Almighty include egad (“ye gods”), odds bodkins (a shortening of “God’s body”), gadzooks (“God’s hooks,” the nails of the cross), drat (“God rot”), ‘sblood (“God’s blood”), and zounds (“God’s wounds”).

Who needs to shout “hell!” when Sam Hill (euphemism for “damn hell”) is available to help us cuss (“curse”) in a socially acceptable manner? Sam Hill was not a particular person, but “Sam Hill” expressions, such as what the Sam Hill! and mad as Sam Hill, grew up in the American West in the 1830s. Sam Hill was a trusty friend of frontiersmen, especially when they needed to clean up their language in the presence of womenfolk. One can count among additional surrogates for hell the words heck, hey, Halifax, Hoboken, and Jesse (“if you don’t watch out, you’re going to catch Jesse.”

We live in a culture in which calling out the name of Jesus Christ in church is a sign of moral rectitude; but, once outside, we have to find ways of not quite saying that name. Among those taboo euphemisms we find gee, gee whiz (“Je-sus”), gee whillikers, jesum crow, Christmas, holy cow, holy crow, holy Christmas, cripes, criminey, crikey, by Jingo, by Jiminy, Jiminy Cricket, Jiminy Christmas, Judas Priest, and even jeepers creepers.

(See EUPHEMISM.)

Zyzzyva. A genus of tropical South American snouted weevil discovered in Brazil. No longer than an ant, this insect could be labeled “the lesser of two weevils.”

With the first five of its seven letters being z or y, zyzzyva is the last word in many dictionaries. And, except for the Index, it’s the last word of this book.

(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE.)