Wisdom teeth appear later in life, when people are “wiser.” 

They don’t actually make you smarter.  They’re just teeth.

The Jesus fish that you see on the back of cars is called the Ichthys (Greek for “fish”).  ICHTHYS is an acrostic (see yesterday’s post) for “Jesus Christ, God’s son, savior” (transliterated from the Greek text). 

It would have been funnier if the acrostic spelled “penguin” or “giraffe” or “corn.”  I would put one of those on my car.

An acrostic is a poem or form of text where the first letter of each line or paragraph spells out a word.

Good

Research

Uncovers

New and

Delightful ways to

Learn, as well as ways to

Educate others

Paronomasia is the fancy word for a pun.  A pun is intentional wordplay, unlike a malapropism (see yesterday’s post).  An eggcorn is in the same family as the pun and malapropism, but differs slightly from both.  One example of an eggcorn would be mistakenly saying “old-timers’ disease,” instead of “Alzheimer’s disease.” But unlike a malapropism where the new sentence is nonsensical, an eggcorn still makes a little sense, as is the case with Alzheimer’s… The linguistic example, of course.  Not the actual disease…

A malapropism is the substitution of a word with a similar-sounding, incorrect word.  For example, people always say “for all intensive purposes.”  This doesn’t make any sense.  It’s supposed to be “all intents and purposes.” 

If anyone hears me using a malapropism, just cut my head off.  I know cutting my head off seems extreme, but I give you full permission to decaffeinate me.

Palindromes are words that are spelled the same backwards and forwards.  Like “race car”  or “madam”). The Finnish word saippuakivikauppias (soapstone vendor) is said to be the world’s longest palindromic word in everyday use.

I definitely talk about “soapstone vendors” every day. 

And this had nothing to do with Sarah Palin.

A Catch-22 refers to an unsolvable logical dilemma.  The phrase comes from Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel “Catch-22.”  The number 22 has no significance.  Heller originally intended to call it “Catch-18,” but this was rejected by his publisher for being too similar to the title of another recently published war novel.  “Catch-11” was also proposed and rejected, due to its similarity to the film “Ocean’s Eleven” which was released in 1960.  “Catch-17” was then also rejected for similar reasons.  “Catch-14” was rejected because the publisher didn’t think 14 was a “funny number.”  If I were Joseph Heller, I would have just given up.  Clearly, there was no way he would win this battle with his publisher.