Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-four. I’ve been collecting weird vocabulary for roughly 20 years — culled from reading in books and articles, along with the occasional oddity in conversation, from Jeopardy or on the internet. (And sometimes, I just go fishing in one of my hard-copy dictionaries.) As you may have guessed, my list
“There isn’t an instruction manual for anything worthwhile.” And that includes poetry. Happily, Alison Malee’s literary output is glowingly accessible — and certainly worthwhile. The quote above is from her 2024 collection of poems, It Is All Equally Fragile; that’s the fourth book by this local author — a 2012 Loyalsock High School graduate who
In any decent dog film, it’s practically a given that the featured canine will die at the end. But how about a pooch-picture where death comes first? And where it’s actually the owner who passes? That would be “The Friend,” a dog movie that’s not just about dogs. In fact, with yet another stunning lead
At last! Webb’s Weird Words is finally returning to its stock-in-trade: definitions and other info on random rosters of oddball vocab. In recent weeks, we’ve looked thematically at medicine, money, shortened words (for Feb.), made-up words (for April Fools’) and two sets culled from the sadly neglected American novelist Charles Portis. So now, as we
Last week, Webb’s Weird Words attempted an April Fools’ column consisting entirely of made-up words. No idea how many readers fell for that — but my spurious list included one whimsical monetary unit: the fictitious praq, supposedly used in the fake former Soviet republic, “Ziurtzybad.” Now if you swallowed that one, don’t feel bad; “praq”
