By Joseph W. Smith III Last week’s “Weird Words” marked installment No. 12; so I took those two digits as a theme and picked out several goodies from pages 1 and 2 of my ever-growing oddball vocabulary list. But I got only halfway through that selection before running out of space. Here is the other
By Joseph W. Smith III Last week, I celebrated the 10th “Weird Words” column with a selection of 10-letter terms. Having thus observed my minor milestone, this week’s installment is devoted to something without which I could never do these pieces: the English dictionary. Back in pre-internet days, when folks always needed books or libraries
For me it was a glorious day in May when I emailed Steph Nordstrom — my estimable editor at Webb — with what I considered a long-shot: I was pitching a weekly column on oddball vocab words. To my everlasting joy, Steph okayed the idea without hesitation — telling me she’d read the dictionary just
In our last two installments, Webb’s Weird Words focused mostly on terms from medicine and India, as I was honoring Abraham Verghese’s current bestseller The Covenant of Water, which revolves around those two subjects. This week, we’re back in random mode: I simply pulled up the first of the 26 pages in my oddball vocab
Last week, Webb’s Weird Words paid homage to the current bestseller Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese. When all was said and done, I wound up adding nearly 40 new words from Verghese’s novel to the ongoing list of oddball vocab I use for these columns. Most were Indian or medical words, since the novel
As your friendly neighborhood lexicographer approaches another collection of weird words for Webb, Abraham Verghese’s novel “The Covenant of Water” stands at #5 on the New York Times bestseller list. Sales have been aided by the sterling success of Verghese’s earlier “Cutting for Stone,” which spent more than two years on the NYT roster —
