I bring this up exclusively because for the last several weeks I have been dying to share something: The word Presbyterians is a perfect anagram of Britney Spears! (I came to find this out because my new book contains a lot of anagrams, which resulted in my becoming anagram-obsessed.)

I spent a lot of time wondering what it says about Britney Spears and/or the English language. Are Britney’s parents just anagrammatically passionate Presbyterians? No; it turns out they’re Baptists. It turns out that Spears isn’t the exception; she’s the rule. Just look at all the celebrities whose names anagram to a single word!

My favorites from the list:

Eric Clapton / Narcoleptic

Tim Russert / mistruster

Anita Morris / rotarianism

Initially, I was going to celebrate June 19th the way I celebrate all other holidays–that is to say, by not blogging–but then when I was reading about Juneteenth, I came across the word portmanteau (which is a great word, and the plural–portmanteaux–is even better, due to the well-known X Law of Linguistics, which holds that all words are improved by an x). Portmanteaux are words created by blending two words–like turning June and Nineteenth into Juneteenth.

From chortle (snort + chuckle), which was coined by Lewis Carroll to Pictionary (picture + dictionary), which was coined by the literary juggernauts at Hasbro, it seems to me that the portmanteau is a wonderful opportunity for aspiring neologists. For inspiration in creating your own portmanteau, check out this list.

There are many theories about why Brazil is so good at football, but I personally believe it is the nicknames–a tradition that dates back almost a century. According to this article, the first Brazillian national team featured an attacking player named Formiga, or ant.

These days, for some reason, Brazil’s best players tend to be named Ronaldo. The current starting line-up features two. Ronaldinho, which means “Little Ronaldo,” is the greatest player in the world (I mean, seriously–he’s so good that sometimes opposing fans cheer him). And Ronaldo used to be Brazil’s best goal scorer. But it may be time for Ronaldo to start going by Ronaldao (meaning “Big Ronaldo”), since the President of Brazil recently phoned the national team’s coach to ask how Ronaldo got so fat.
Incidentally, the goal-scorer in Brazil’s 1-0 defeat of Croatia today? Kaka. Get your head out of the gutter, dear readers–it’s just a shortened form of Ricardo.

At any rate, any serious speller (and I myself was third runner up in the Audubon Park Elementary School spelling bee as a fourth grader) knows that the German is the Everest of languages. This year, for instance, both the winning word (ursprache) and the word misspelled by the adorably Canadian Finola Hackett (weltschmerz) were German. In a related story, they are fantastic words. Those wacky Germans have a word for everything.
Ursprache, for instance, means “the lost language of Paradise.”

Weltschmerz, which is in the running to be my all-time favorite word ever, means “depression caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.”

Other personal favorites from the world of German include “sitzpinkler,” a word that plays a sizable role in my new novel and literally means “a man who sits to pee.” How we have survived so long in the English speaking world without the word sitzpinkler is one of the great human mysteries; hopefully together we can bring it into the common lexicon so that one day young spellers in Washington, D.C. will stumble all over it.

For a great collection of German words in English, visit here–but keep your pop-up blocker on.

My all-time favorite marriage certificate comes from this apparently true story: Amidst a thunderstorm, Swift had sought refuge under a large tree. A man and his pregnant fiancee showed up soon thereafter, and Swift (who was, besides being the best satirist ever, a priest) offered to marry them quick before the baby popped out illegitimate. He then wrote them a marriage certificate:
“Under an oak, in stormy weather,
I joined this rogue and whore together;
And none but He who rules the thunder
Can put this rogue and whore asunder.”

Long-standing rumor has it that Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw’s 45-year marriage to Charlotte Shaw (nee Payne-Townsend) was never consummated.

And finally: Did you know that today in America, the average wedding dress costs more than a space shuttle?

Prepare yourself for the salt-in-the-sugar trick tomorrow morning with The 100 Top April Fools’ Pranks of all time. My personal favorite would be the April 1998 issue of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. Now, we do not wish to criticize New Mexico, which we are sure includes many, many citizens who favor science and reason, but this journal has never had a terribly high subscription base.

And yet despite that small circulation, the journal became famous for publishing an article claiming that the legislature in my home state, Alabama, had changed the value of pi from 3.14… to its “Biblical value” of 3. The article spread on the Internet, was taken as gospel (so much for science and reason), and continues to get occasionally forwarded to this day.

Oh, and if you’re looking for April Fool’s pranks, consider taking a page from hilarious prankster Uday Hussein. Between 1998 and 2000, Uday’s newspaper published a different hilarious April Fools’ Day story each year, including one asserting that jokingly told the Iraqi people that their food ration would be increased to include bananas. The people were all like, “Oh thank God, I’m so hungry,” and then Uday was all like, “Just kidding,” and then the people were all like, “Oh, ha ha! That was a good one, Uday. It’s nice to know that you’re not too busy with your 1,200 luxury automobiles to share a joke with the commoners now and again.”

Rene Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women, a fetish that turned out to shape his beliefs about free will and presage Freudian psychology. After spending his early adulthood ceaselessly attracted to women with strombosis (as crossed eyes are now known), Descartes determined that his fetish went back to his childhood, when he’d had a cute and cross-eyed female playmate. By recognizing the root of his fascination, he was able to rid himself of it with his free will.

That’s all fine and good for Descartes, but in retrospect, maybe he should have kept his fetish. When you look like a very surprised Inigo Montoya, after all, you can’t really afford to be picky. Seriously: