Apotropaic means having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck. So, if you have some sort of lucky charm, it's an apotropaic object. Apotropaic names are ones that are supposed to protect your child from the evil eye or the bad-luck fairy. There is a sadness in all this. Parents who have lost children may give a newborn a name that means life (Hayyim, Hayyah, Zoe), or a name that wishes the baby well for the future. (Goodluck is a popular name in some African countries.)

Pterodactyl means 'wing finger'. The word is Greek, from the two words 'pteron' (wing) and 'dactyl' (finger).

In verse, a dactyl is a long sound then two short sounds: tum-ti-ti. Some names that are dactyls:

Emily

Eleanor

Percival

Some famous people whose names are double dactyls:

This is from the Greek and means 'later, earlier'. It's when you get things the wrong way round:

"Writing was his Butter and Bread"

"He played Loose and Fast with the rules"

"This place needs cleaning from bottom to top";

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. For example:

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie

Buy, buy, Miss American Pie

The first is saying farewell to someone. The second is telling her to pounce on a particular juicy stock.

If you go ti-tum (short-long) it's called an iamb. Put 5 iambs together and you have iambic pentameter (pent = 5):

ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum

Some song lyrics in iambic pentameter (5 ti-tums):

Wel-come| to-the | ho-tel | ca-li | forn-ia
You-shake| my-nerves| and-you| rat-tle| my-brains
You-got| ta-fight| for-your| right-to | par-teee

There's a flavour of the Homophone called a Mondegreen. Here's an example:

Grade A

Grey Day

They both sound the same. But if you're waiting for your teacher to give you a grade, you might want to hold off the celebrations if she's looking out of the window:

Here's another:

"Can you recognise speech?"

"Yes, I can wreck a nice beach. When do I start?"

When you mishear a lyric, that's a mondegreen:

Excuse me while I kiss this guy.

Excuse me while I kiss the sky.

The term Mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright in 1954. Writing in Harper's magazine, she said she misheard the song lyric ' ... laid him on the green'. She thought it was 'Lady Mondegreen'.

In the modern Christian bible, there is this in Genesis (about the flood):

"The Lord regretted having made humankind on the earth ..."

So, the lord regrets having made humankind.

In the King James version (about 1600), however:

"It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth"

Two things: repent has become regret since 1600; humankind replaces the sexist 'man'.

200 years earlier, Wycliffe's bible had this:

"It forthought him that he had made man in erthe"

The word forthought means displeases here. (The gh at the end was pronounced like the ch in loch - For-thoct.)

An even earlier version (about 1000) by the Abbot Aelfric used the Old English word 'ofthuhte', which meant displeases.

In a thousand years, God has gone from displeasure to regret. You're a lot angrier if you're displeased with something than you are with regretting it. So which is correct?

The Greek word is μεταυοια, which is transalted as Metanoia. The Oxford English Dictionary has this as a definition of Metanoia:

"The act or process of changing one's mind; spec. penitence, repentance; reorientation of one's way of life, spiritual conversion."

So, basically, God changed his mind about humankind and decided to kill the whole lot of us. Nice.

Believe it or not, whole books have been written on the Greek word Metanoia. Did he regret making us, or did he repent of making us? Or are they the same thing? Biblical scholars have been arguing over the matter for centuries. I wouldn't hold your breath for a quick decision on the matter.

In verse, if you go tum-tum it's called a Spondee. Apparently, this sound was used by the Romans as a melody while they poured a libation to the gods. Though I imagine the gods would be banging on the celestial floor with a broomstick telling you to shut the **** up if you kept up with a tum-tum rhythm all day long. In the movie Jaws, Spielberg used a spondee for when his shark appears:

tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, etc

Hum the tum-tums, slowly at first, and then pick up speed. Then get the hell out of the water because it's a - Spondee!!!