Edmund Crispin (1921-1978) wrote mystery novels. His detective was Gervase Fen. A defining mark of Crispin's novels is that most people need to have a dictionary close by when they read them (I know I did - I've read them all now and have introduced quite a few new words to my vocabulary) because he seems to take a positive joy in showing off his erudition. Not that there's anything wrong with that - he used words that evoked exactly what he meant to say (and his detective was a professor of English) and what's wrong with getting an education in the English language as well as enjoying a mystery story?
Tonight I was re-reading a short story called "Within the Gates", published in Beware of the Trains. The "reveal" of the story was that there was a difference between the word "cryptogam" and "cryptogram".
A cryptogram is, of course, "a message or writing in code or cipher; cryptograph".
A cryptogam is "any of the Cryptogamia, a former primary division of plants that have no true flowers or seeds and that reproduce by spores, as the ferns, mosses, fungi, and algae."
Crispin offered another two words: formicate and fornicate.
Fornicate is of course to have sex with a prostitute. (Or if you're in to architecture, "arched or vaulted in form."
Formicate, is to 1. to crawl around like ants or 2. to swarm with ants or other crawling things
Now, I'd like to see someone use that word in a sentence!
So this has brought the twinkling of a new "word search" to my mind... what words are there that, if you leave one letter out, or change one letter, mean something totally different. So I'm starting a collection of those words.
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