Hapax Legomenon

A hapax legomenon is the archaelogical translator's curse, a new word or phrase which occurs only once in a text. Such words are notoriously difficult to interpret, since in many cases, a word's meaning in an unknown language can best be determined by examining its context.

Here, however, I simply want to record the occurrence of a few memorable nonce words, catchwords, and other alphabetic formulations.

• Aoxomoxoa is the palindromic title of an album by the Grateful Dead with an exceptionally memorable cover.
• Coloress green ideas sleep furiously.
  Furiously sleep ideas green colorless. two sentences invented (he hopes) by Noam Chomsky, and claimed to be examples of the fact that a sentence can be meaningless but syntactically correct or incorrect. A salient point of his argument was that, surely, neither sentence had ever previously been expressed, and hence no one can say that their syntactical correctness is being judged based on statistical or probabilistic grounds.
• Croatoan is a word carved into a tree at the deserted Roanoke colony and discovered by belated rescuers. The fate of the colonists is unknown, and their mystery subsumed in this mysterious word.
• Dszquphsbnt! is the title of the cryptograms section of Games magazine, but no one can say why!
• Evoe, the cry of the worshippers of Dionysus or Bacchus.
• ghoti is how George Bernard Shaw claimed you could spell "fish" in English, using the gh from "enough", the o from "women", and the ti from "nation".
• grue was an invented word, used, along with bleen (whose meaning you will have to guess), to embody a philosophical argument about induction. In the original discussion by Nelson Goodman, we suppose that the color of various objects has been observed just once and recorded. We also have a special time T, sometimes taken to be 1 January 2000. We describe an object as grue if its color was observed before time T, and found to be green, or if its color was observed after time T and found to be blue. Goodman's intent was to attack the inductional argument that finding another green opal means that we have strengthened the case that all opals are green; the same discovery, made before time T, strengthens the case that all opals are grue, and yet the consequences, after time T, would be quite different. The word grue was adopted by others, and the meaning was modified, perhaps unintentionally, to denote objects which are green before time T and blue after - that is, that the color of the object is understood to actually have changed. This is really a different idea entirely. Meanwhile, linguists have adopted "grue" to describe languages in which the colors blue and green are not distinguished.
• Hardw is the presumably truncated name of a store seen often in B. Kliban cartoons.
• Klaatu, Barada Nikto is the message that the dying alien Klaatu tells the earthboy to deliver to the robot Gort, so that it will not destroy the earth, in "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Somewhat diluting its hapax legomenonal status, though, the phrase showed up again in "Army of Darkness", a movie about a man sent back a medieval era infested with zombies. At one point, he is told by wise men to deliver this same phrase. (Apparently, it's also appeared on The Monkees, on Alice Cooper's "School's Out", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "The Rockford Files", "Tron", And then, of course, there was the band Klaatu...
• Lorem Ipsum is a piece of stock text used by printers to display their fonts or layouts or printing styles. The text is intended to be meaningless, while looking typical. The text has been used in this format for over 500 years. The original text was extracted, somewhat haphazardly, from passages in a work by Cicero. In particular, the opening phrase Lorem ipsum was pulled from Cicero's line

  "Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet,..."

• Mr Mxyptlk is a goofy magical pixie from another dimension who teases and torments Superman, and can only be sent back home by tricking him into saying his name backwards.
• Nevermore: so quoth the Raven;
• Notary Sojac was a phrase which popped up from time to time in the cartoon strip "Smokey Stover". I recall one case where it appeared in a certificate hanging on a wall, and assumed that this was some kind of official position. However, the phrase was never explained.
• Oobleck, what rained down on Bartholomew Cubbins after the king requested a form of precipitation more interesting than rain or snow; invented by Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) early enough in his career that he wasn't merely demonstrating his ability to spout cute nonsense;
• Plastics! was the one word of advice given to Benjamin in The Graduate, and then taken as a damning indictment of the materialism and careerism of the 1960's.
• Pompatus is a nonsense word that occurs in Steve Miller's song "The Joker", and has been a famous puzzle for years. The word is also transcribed as pompatous and pompitous. Steve Miller had no explanation for the meaning of the word, which occurs in his lyrics as

  Some people call me the space cowboy,
  Some people call me the gangster of love,
  Some people call me Maurice,
  Cause I speak of the pompatus of love.

  According to Cecil Adams in his "The Straight Dope" column, however, Miller had likely borrowed from a song called "The Letter" by Vernon Green, which had the lines

  Oh my darling, let me whisper sweet words of pizmotality,
  And discuss the puppetutes of love.

  Green said he'd coined the words, and that "pizmotality" referred to words of such secrecy they could only be shared with a loved one, while "puppetutes" referred to a puppet-like fantasy love object who would be his everything.
• Potrzebie, a word which the writers of Mad Magazine would merrily daub here and there throughout the issues, with never an explanation of its meaning. Donald Knuth actually contributed an article to Mad which was published as "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures". The word is of Polish origin, but was simply adopted for its humorous potential.
• Rache written in blood on a wall in a room where a dead man lay, in "A Study in Scarlet", and at first thought to be an unfinished invocation of the name "Rachel", presumably the incitement of the murder.
• Rosebud, the bathetic secret behind Citizen Kane's life, nothing more than his name for a favorite sled. You are free to ask whether this distracts from the unwatchableness of the greatest movie ever made, or to remind me that rosebud was supposedly Hearst's nickname for something naughty, in which case, so what?
• Sockdolager, which means something conclusive, or stunning or remarkable or unique, was a punch line in "Our American Cousin", and was the cue for which John Wilkes Booth waited before rushing into Lincoln's theater compartment and shooting him, relying on the laughter of the audience to provide a distraction. The actual line from the play was

  "Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologising old man-trap!"

  and while it may have had some local currency back then, this is surely about the only setting in which most people will run across this word any more!
• squeamish ossifrage. In August 1977, Martin Gardner published in his Scientific American column on the RSA encryption scheme. The encrypted phrase, was was deciphered on 26 April 1994, was

  "The magic words are squeamish ossifrage."

• Zotz! was a word which could be used as an incantation to drastically slow down the motion of all other creatures. The playful use of this word was explored in a book of the same name by Walter Karig, and then a movie starring Tom Poston.

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