In a 1991 Book-of-the-Month Club survey, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird ranked second only to the Bible as “making a difference in people’s lives.” According to Lee biographer Charles Shields — who also provided the above statistic — the book still draws a million readers every year. So most folks in Webb-land have probably
Here at “Weird Words,” we’re awash in oddball vocab from To Kill a Mockingbird — which my lit. class is finishing at the CHEF home-school co-op in Montoursville. Last week, using the order in which they appear in the book, we started with chattel, flivver, beadle, scuppernong and hoodoo — some of these being tied
Chef is a French word that’s distantly related to both chief and the Latin cap (“head”). But in Lycoming County, it can be an acronym—that is, a pronounceable abbreviation like NATO, AWOL and YOLO. To be specific, here in Central PA, CHEF stands for Christian Home Educators’ Fellowship—a homeschool co-op that’s been meeting weekly in
“What on earth does that mean?” This query is pretty much the only connection between our new list of weird words and its publication date: Earth Day — April 22. Currently standing at exactly 3200 oddball terms, my running list tends to generate that question when others look through it. But, sad to say, I
As regular readers of “Weird Words” know, your local lexicographer keeps a massive running-list of oddball vocab. Laid out in space-saving, three-column format, it currently totals nearly 3,200 terrific terms. For April — since it is of course the year’s fourth month — I simply flipped to page four and selected a dozen: Bindi (BIN-dee,
