purp
n.— «A man he owned a terrier dorg—/A bob-tailed onery cuss./And that there purp got that there man/In many an ugly muss.» —“The Fate of A Fighting Dog” by Sim Pelton Indiana Democrat (Indiana, Pa.) June 2, 1870. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...