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F is for Foyle’s Philavery

  F is for Foyle’s and the alliterative sounding word Philavery which completes the book’s title. You won’t find philavery in the Oxford English, Webster’s Collegiate, or any other dictionary that I know of because the mother-in-law of Christopher Foyle, the author,...

E is for Elucidation: “Gxddbov Xxkxzt Pg Ifmk”

In “D is for Detective,” I left OED former editor John Simpson’s discussion of the f-word dangling. He titled chapter nine of The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary, “Gxddbov Xxkxzt Pg Ifmk.” I read it right away. Then...

A is for Anu

Anu Garg, that is. You haven’t heard of him? Well, there are a quarter million word lovers in 200 countries who subscribe to his  A-Word-A-Day column (AWAD) which The New York Times calls “the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass mail in cyberspace.” I...