Reading the Scrabble Dictionary: Week 30

Lots of various kinds of women's clothing this week (partlet, peignoir, pelerine, peplos), but most importantly, the discovery of pleonasm: the use of needless words. Such a word is not only indicative of much of what I am doing in reading and blogging about the Scrabble Dictionary, which contains many a needless word, but pleonasm is also a semantic paradox in itself—when was the last time you needed the word pleonasm?

(These kinds of self-referential words, by the way, are part of a fascinating subset of linguistics called autological terms. Click here for a partial list. My favorite is shibboleth, since knowing the word shibboleth is a cue to other people who know the word that you are cued in)

One could also argue that there is no such thing as a pleonasm since Scrabble ensures the need of all the vocabulary you can get (minus one-lettered words and words that go beyond the availability of tiles, I suppose).

Anyway. I also had fun with pangram on Twitter.

Just one image today, for pandanus: a tropical plant. My son is eating a pandanus key in the Marshall Islands (taken 2011). You either love pandanus or hate it. I hated it, and then I loved it. It is a remarkable, very time-consuming fruit. Islanders use it not only for its critical vitamins but also to floss.

⚛ Units of the Week
    Parasang: a Persian unit of distance
    Parsec: a unit of astronomical distance
    Parton: a hypothetical atomic particle
    Pascal: a unit of pressure
    Pataca: a monetary unit of Macao
    Pengo: a former monetary unit of Hungary
    Penni: a formerly used Finnish coin
    Penny: a coin of the United Kingdom
    Percent: one part in a hundred
    Perigon: an angle equal to 360 degrees
    Peseta: a monetary unit of Spain
    Pesewa: a monetary unit of Ghana
    Peso: a monetary unit of various Spanish-speaking countries
    Petabyte: one quadrillion bytes
    Pfennig: a formerly used bronze coin of Germany

!!! Unexpected Words of the Week
    Pandy: to punish by striking the hand
    Pangram: a sentence that includes all the letters of the alphabet
    Pardee/pardi/pardie/pardy: a mild oath (meaning "certainly" and coming from the corruption of "By God!" Most likely to be mistaken as "party.")
    Parlando: sung in a manner suggestive of speech
    Parosmia: a distortion of the sense of smell
    Pash: to strike violently
    Patagium: a wing membrane of a bat
    Patootie: the buttocks
    Patzer: an inept chess player
    Paxwax: the nuchal ligament (duh!)
    Peace, v.: to be or become silent
    Peen: to beat with the non-flat end of a hammerhead
    Penology: the science of the punishment of crime
    Peopler: one that peoples
    Perdu: a soldier sent on a dangerous mission (isn't that a little pessimistic?)
    Petnaper: one who steals a pet
    Phaeton: a light carriage (carriage sighting!)

♡ Favorite Words of the Week
    Pampero: a cold, dry wind
    Panhuman: pertaining to all humanity
    Parallax: an apparent optical displacement of an object
    Paraph: a flourish at the end of a signature
    Parve: made without milk or meat
    Patency: the state of being obvious
    Peavey: a lever used to move logs
    Penster: a writer
    Peonage: the condition of being a peon
    Pergola: a shaded shelter or passageway
    Peripety: a sudden change in a course of events

(Pages 407–420)