On the train home the other night I heard a young girl explaining palindromes to her dad. She didn’t use the word palindrome, but she patiently explained to him how the word madam was spelt the same front and backwards, with that patience children have because they assume adults don’t know anything.

It got me thinking about how much English speakers invest brain-space in this kind of trivia about their own language, its spelling and words - and it’s the same for many languages with high rates of literacy. Especially for curious and bookish types like me. It’s where the silly title of this post comes from; I only learnt these words because they are the basis of amusing factoids. I was told facetious was the only English word with all five vowels in order (incorrect, there is at least abstemious). I memorised antidisestablishmentarianism because it was supposedly one of the longest words in English. And although I’ve never needed to talk about female pubic wigs, once I learnt English had bothered to come up with a word like merkin, it just stayed in my brain.

With a thousand years of history, a third-hand alphabet and a world of linguistic influences it’s not surprising there are so many quirks to the English. Studying linguistics makes you realise that many of these features of language aren’t surprising. I love telling undergrads that Australian English doesn’t have 5 vowels, it has closer to 20 vowel sounds (try fitting all of them in a single word). Once you’ve learnt about productive morphology and recursion it’s not hard to see that words could get a whole lot longer. And if the world really needs pubic wigs then it’s not surprising we also gave them a name.

Still, these factlets are attractive, especially to the kind of mind that enjoys looking up etymologies, learning new words (hello parbunkells) and doing word puzzles. I’ve mentioned three that I remember. What language-factlets do you remember being introduced to as a kid?