About TWD
Occasionally an especially emphatic reader letter prompts me to reconsider my decision, years ago, not to pursue my first career choice, dog grooming. “Your claim that the word ‘thug’ originally came from ‘thuggee,’ ritual strangulation and robbery supposedly practiced by followers of the Hindu goddess Kali (whom you describe as possessing ‘huge glowing red eyes, fangs, and necklace of human skulls’), is ridiculous,” wrote one reader a few years ago, who then went on to helpfully inform me that “The many modern followers of the great Goddess Kali have no use for the slanderous antics of mouth-breathing morons like you. I’d be careful whose Goddess you offend, especially since Kali liked to drink the blood of her opponents in battle! Be warned: we are not amused.” After I emerged from meditating on this letter in my coat closet a few weeks later, I spent the next several months checking for glowing red eyes on every subway train I boarded. Eventually I concluded that it was impossible to distinguish between disgruntled Kali fans and disgruntled Mets fans, so I gradually relaxed. I recalled that my father had spawned similar outrage in the mid-1960s when he dared to suggest in print that Ringo Starr was not exactly the world’s greatest drummer, a parallel which comforted me (although the bit about Kali drinking the blood of her enemies seemed a bit more serious than the wrath of a few thousand irate Beatles fans).
After a few weeks of laboriously hunting-and-pecking my columns on an old Underwood manual typewriter, I reluctantly broke down, dipped my bruised digits into my bank account, and bought my first computer. Within a few months I was collecting the columns I wrote for newspapers into a bimonthly illustrated newsletter, which I offered to readers for the princely sum of $10 per year, an amount scientifically calculated to land me in the poorhouse as quickly as possible. In considering possible names for my new project, I decided to recycle the name of a radio program my father had produced years earlier, The Word Detective.
The Word Detective newsletter was an immediate success with its hundreds of subscribers, but each month saw an increasing number of copies returned to me in small plastic bags after having been stomped, shredded, and often apparently chewed in transit by unknown parties. Just as I was about to throw in the towel, however, the internet arrived to save my bacon.
Early 1995 saw the debut of The Word Detective on the Web (www.word-detective.com), a site where readers could browse current and past columns and, more importantly, send in their questions via e-mail. Since then, readership of the web Word Detective has jumped from the dozens to the thousands per week, and the site has been the recipient of numerous prestigious (but inexplicably cash-free) awards. And while The Word Detective currently appears in newspapers all over the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Japan, the growing popularity of the internet has broadened its global audience by millions of readers, from small towns in Iowa to small towns in China. Reader mail, the real index of any columnist’s success, currently runs about 200 questions per week.
Approximately 100 of those questions are really one particular question, about perhaps the most obnoxious riddle ever invented: “There are three common words in the English language that end with ‘gry.’ Angry is one and hungry is another. What is the third word? Everyone uses it every day and everyone knows what it means. If you have been listening, I have already told you what the word is.”
When I received this question for the first time about four years ago, I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the answer, and, after pounding my head against the wall for a week or two, did some serious research and arrived at the following realizations: first, we can all stop looking for that third “gry” word. There is no other “common English word” ending in “gry,” although there are a few obscure ones, such as “aggry” (a type of bead) and “gry” itself (meaning “a very small amount”).
Page 4 of 6 | Previous page | Next page
