You may think I have misspelled the title of this post, and in a way I have, but I did so deliberately. The other day when typing struggle I accidentally typed sturggle. I thought that it looked like an interesting word, and wondered what it might mean.

Apparently I’m not the first person to come up with this word – according to the Urban Dictionary, sturggle means:

To be afflicted with a debilitating hangover to the point where you cannot speak.

I’ve never been sturggled in this sense.

Do you have any other suggestions as to what sturggle might mean?

Have you accidentally come up with any other new words?

If you saw this sign, what kind of plant(s) would you expect to be crossing?

In this context, plant refers to “a large, heavy machine or vehicle used in industry, for building roads, etc.” It can also mean “machines used in industry” or “a factory in which a particular product is made or power is produced” [source]

Apparently the first recorded use of plant for a factory dates from 1789 – this meaning developed from the idea of the factory being ‘planted’ [source]. Perhaps the meaning was extended to the machines used in factories, and to other large industrial machines.

Is plant used to refer to large machines only in the UK?

In the café where I had lunch today I saw a sign saying “Blue Sky tables are for sharing. Budge up and say Hi!” (see photo).

I thought budge up sounding like a very British kind of thing to say. Is it used in other English-speaking countries? If not, how would you ask someone to move up?

Budge comes from the French bouger (to move), from the Vulgar Latin *bullicāre, frequentative of Latin bullīre (to bubble, boil), from bulla (bubble; bubble-shaped object), from Gaulish, from Proto-Indo-European *beu ‎(swelling) [source].

In Hiberno-English people might describe something fun and enjoyable as a gas. For example, “That’s gas”, “A gas laugh”, “Come on, it’ll be gas”, “He’s a gas character”, “Your man is gas” [source].

Last week an Irish friend told me that this expression comes from laughing gas (nitrous oxide), which was used at parties to induce hilarity and euphoria in the guests.

According to The Grammarphobia Blog, the earliest citation in the OED for gas meaning fun was in James Joyce’s 1914 collection of stories, Dubliners, in which one character says he’s brought along a slingshot “to have some gas with the birds.”

According to Historically Speaking, Humphrey Davy noticed that nitrous oxide produced a state of induced euphoria which led to laughter followed by a state of stupor and, finally, a dreamy and sedated state. He introduced it to the British upper class in 1799 and it became used as a recreational drug at “laughing parties”. The term “it’s a gas” soon came to refer to what happened at such parties.

Does anyone know if there is a word for words that have the same length and constituent letters, but are not anagrams, such as bee and ebb, and aloof and offal.

I received an email from Peter Hewkin today who suggests the word magrang (a magrang of anagram) for such words.

Do you have other suggestions?

Can you think of other examples?