Silliness for the weekend: today’s Zippy plays with -uzzle:
Muzzle nuzzling has a great sound to it.
Fenwood Spacebag looks like one of Bill Griffith’s absurd invented names, combining a brand name (in this case, Space Bag vacuum-seal storage packs) with a personal name that he finds entertaining.
September 9, 2011 at 7:08 am |
Thinking that the author might have done better than “sauce guzzling” by using another “-uzzle” word instead of “sauce”, I went looking for a word list that is arranged alphabetically, but by the letters in right to left order instead of the standard left to right.
I’m sure I’ve seen such a list before, but searching for things like “reverse alphabetical order”, “backwards dictionary”, or “reverse order dictionary” doesn’t get me what I want. The rhyming dictionaries seem to just give matching final syllables by phoneme, so that doesn’t help either, although I haven’t done an exhaustive search (and can’t since it’s 11pm and I still haven’t gotten the kids to bed).
Any ideas?
September 9, 2011 at 7:33 am |
There are fancy reverse-order dictionaries, but a cheap and useful one is Walker’s Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language (which I have in a 1983 edition, with a supplement bringing it up to date). Walker’s has fuzzle ‘to fuddle, intoxicate’, guzzle, muzzle, and puzzle, and that’s it. Words in -azzle, -izzle, and -ozzle could expand this territory a bit.
I don’t know of any such dictionaries on-line, unfortunately.
September 9, 2011 at 9:18 am |
I guess he could have used “fuzzle guzzling” to mean drinking with the intention of getting intoxicated, but that might have been pretty obscure (at least I’ve never heard of “fuzzle”).