• The most frequently used noun in English is ‘time’. •The Amondawa people of the Amazon have no word for ‘time’. • Danish has no word for ‘please’. • Sanskrit has no word for ‘emotion’. • Winston Churchill was the firstto use ‘sniper’ in print. The word came from India and meant someone who shot snipe – small, fast birds with an erratic flight path. •The word ‘strike’, as in refusal to work, dates from 1768, when angry sailors in Sunderland disabled ships by ‘striking’ their sails. • is Japanese for an actor who specialises in female roles. •An abbey-lubber is a lazy monk. • Sussex dialect has more than 30 words for mud. • Borborygmi is the technical word for stomach rumbles. •The first written record of the word ‘pizza’ dates from 997AD.n • Hemipygic means ‘having only one buttock’: literally ‘half-arsed’. • Deipnophobia is the fear of dinner-party conversations. •A muntin is the thin strip of wood or metal that divides the glass in a window. • Charette is an intense flurry of activity to finish something by a deadline. • Nikhedonia is the pleasurable anticipation of success before any actual work has been done. • Aprosexia is the inability to concentrate on anything. •A wonty-tump is Herefordshire dialect for a molehill. •A babalevante is someone who makes feeble jokes. • is a useful German verb meaning ‘to whisper angrily’. • Forflitten means ‘overwhelmed by unreasonable and out-ofproportion scolding’. • Autotelic means ‘worth doing for its own sake’ (like this column).
