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    Uncle John's Facts to Go Talk Wordy To Me
    Uncle John's Facts to Go Talk Wordy To Me
    Uncle John's Facts to Go Talk Wordy To Me
    Ebook94 pages54 minutes

    Uncle John's Facts to Go Talk Wordy To Me

    By Bathroom Readers' Institute

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Language lovers rejoice at the best wordplay articles in the history of Uncle John!

    We asked Roget himself what he thought of Talk Wordy To Me, and he gushed that it’s “incredible, magnificent, wonderful, marvelous, spectacular, astonishing, awe-inspiring, tremen…” Then we cut him off because there’s only so much room to tell you about all the great articles you’ll find in this e-book about word and phrase origins, anagrams, palindromes, puns, jargon, tongue twisters, and the (unintentionally) naughtiest typos ever typed. What else is in here? Lots! A smorgasbord! A cornucopia! A plethora! Myriad! So expand your vocabulary with…

     

    • How txting b changin langage lol
    • The epic story of epic words that are losing their luster (like “epic”)
    • A pop music anagram quiz

    • The world's wordiest novelist

    • Presidential misspeaks that spawned new words

    • Hilarious headstones from around the world

    • Words and phrases that are much older than you’d think (like “politically correct” and “truthiness”)
    • Peter Mark Roget’s obsessive-compulsive quest to create his famous thesaurus
    • What irony isn’t
    • Trivia, with a catch—all answers contain poo

    And much, much more!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortable Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2014
    ISBN9781626862449
    Uncle John's Facts to Go Talk Wordy To Me
    Author

    Bathroom Readers' Institute

    The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market—Throne Sitters—and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.

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      Book preview

      Uncle John's Facts to Go Talk Wordy To Me - Bathroom Readers' Institute

      THOU ART A FLESH-

      MONGER!

      We begin with a blast from the Shakespearean past: It’s the Bard’s best barbs.

      Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, Thou lilyliver’d boy.

      —Macbeth

      Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous.

      —As You Like It

      He’s a disease that must be cut away.

      —Coriolanus

      Thou art a flesh-monger, a fool and a coward.

      —Measure for Measure

      Thy tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile.

      —Cymbeline

      You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!

      —Henry IV, Part 2

      Methink’st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee.

      —All’s Well That Ends Well

      Thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch!

      —Henry IV, Part 1

      You are as a candle, the better burnt out.

      —Henry IV, Part 2

      I scorn you, scurvy companion. What, you poor, base, rascally, cheating, lack-linen mate! Away, you mouldy rogue!

      —Henry IV, Part 2

      Thine face is not worth sunburning.

      —Henry V

      It is certain that when he makes water, his urine is congealed ice.

      —Measure for Measure

      I do wish thou wert a dog, That I might love thee something.

      —Timon of Athens

      Longest English word with alternating consonants and vowels: Honorificabilitudinitatibus.

      MODERN WORDS…NOT!

      Here are a few terms that you might think were recent additions to English but have actually been in the language for quite some time.

      POLITICALLY CORRECT: Dates back to a 1793 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Chisholm v. Georgia. Justice James Wilson wrote that the people, not the states, held the real power in the country: To ‘The United States’ instead of to the ‘People of the United States’ is the toast given. This is not politically correct.

      SMASH HIT: The entertainment trade magazine Variety began using this accolade to describe a successful movie in the 1920s.

      SPORK: The term for a spoon/fork has been around since at least 1909, when it appeared as an entry in the Century Dictionary. The utensil itself has been in use since the mid-1800s.

      BUNK: This word for empty talk or nonsense originated in 1820 when Congressman Felix Walker from Buncombe, North Carolina, talked at length about whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state. Politicians subsequently adopted the phrase talking from Buncombe. That was shortened to bunkum and finally to bunk by humorist George Ade, who wrote in his 1900 book More Fables, History is more or less bunk.

      TRUTHINESS: Popularized by satirist Stephen Colbert in 2005, it’s been listed in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1824 as an alternate form of truthfulness. When told that it was already a word, Colbert retorted, You don’t look up ‘truthiness’ in a book, you look it up in your gut!

      NOT!: Loudly proclaiming Not! at the end of an assertion to negate that assertion was popularized in the late 1980s in Saturday Night Live’s Wayne’s World sketches. However, the joke first gained popularity in the early 1900s. Humorist Ellis Parker Butler wrote in Pig Is Pigs (1905), "Cert’nly, me dear friend Flannery. Delighted! Not!"

      Figure this one out: What word is synonymous with both solve and shape? A: Figure.

      NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY

      TYPOS

      It’s good that we at the BRI are impeckable spellers and perfeckshunistic proofreaders, or it would be really embarrassing to make fun of other peeple’s mistakes that turned innocent phrases into indecent ones. These illustrate the old adage that the devil’s in the detales…er, details.

      MISSED IT BY ONE LETTER

      • The Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Idaho was just one letter off when it printed a recipe for a Bowel Full of Brownies. (Does that make it a typoo?)

      • E. S. Gaffney missed it by one letter while working at the U.S. Department of Energy. She submitted a proposal to an official whose last name is Prono, but Microsoft Word’s auto-correct feature changed it to Porno. Gaffney’s proposal was rejected.

      • Reader’s Digest ran an article about women’s rights. In the headline, the R in Rights was replaced by a T, so readers saw Movers & Shakers in Women’s Tights.

      • In 2010 a communications firm called Blue Waters Group made an all-too-common typo. What set theirs apart is that it appeared on

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