Here's a fun writing exercise the artist Danny Smith turned me on to. He suggested taking the first and last entry on a page from Webster's dictionary and combine the meanings to create a new word -- he calls the exercise "Webster's Synthesized." He was reminded of this when I sent him a note about a word from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake -- now there's a book with thousands of invented words informed by Joyce's twelve or more spoken languages. Anyway, Danny Smith has come up with some royal ones. Instead of Webster's I used my Chamber's dictionary. Here are some of the ones I came up with this morning on the typewriter. At the end of the list are some unfinished terms which you, dear reader(s) I hope may fill in.


Coccid Cockatrice
a fabulous serpent with the wings of a bird and the head of a cock and a dragon's tail sprung from an infection that results from inhalation of the spores of the fungus coccidioides immitis, often affecting felines or small children, from whose nostrils this creature usually springs.

Hyman Hysteron Proteron
a very rare condition in woman where menopause precedes virginity.

Experimental Exsanguination
one of the various untested methods of Dr. Von Von Leibendorf, a Cuban vampire famous for draining the blood of his subjects using complex Goldberg style machinery (ex. a chicken pecks an egg which breaks the yoke which fills a thimble which drops into a water tank depressing a lever which releases piranhas that devour a mouse whose weight releases a seesaw with a hypodermic needle on the end which pricks the subject.)

Schlemiel Stone
a legendary stone in the northern reaches of Gallic country with a sword stuck inside of it. He who is able to extract the sword would gain extremely clumsy awful powers to lose any battle fought for centuries.

Lout Lozenge
a diamond-shaped parallelogram or rhombus, sweet, often medicated for the purpose of enticing then sedating an ill-mannered or aggressive man or youthful bumpkin.

Here are the ones I didn't write definitions for:

Reindeer Relapse

ICBM Ichthyic

Hack Haggis

Glucose Gnosis

Limbeck Limonite