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Saturday, May 24, 2008

Aluminum Clutch

For the third installment of word-of-the-week, I've decided that Useless Vocabulary Day is too pejorative a term for something that I aim to be doing for your enjoyment. (And you will enjoy it. Enjoy it! So help me, you will enjoy it.) Henceforth, it shall be known as Dia de las Palabras Nuevas.
itaiitai — noun: a bone disease caused by cadmium
Showing up next to nowhere online, itaiitai apparently is a real thing. Its name purportedly originates from the Japanese expression for "ouch, ouch." While I can't find any pronunciation guide online, I believe it's six syllables: "eee-tai-ee-tai." The book I got this from, The Superior Person's Book of Words, notes that the word is of interest in that its etymology could be a pattern for new English names for diseases and disorders — "eekeek" for arachnophobia, "unhunh" for constipation, "uhoh" for premature ejaculation, as so forth. Seems reasonable.

There must be a way to work this word into a clever, sentence-long palindrome.

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