By Gosh, There's a Name for It (Part 6)

In our Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you'll find a name for . . .

• a soundalike swearword that allows one to cuss without being offensive (such as the euphemistic frak popularized by the TV series Battlestar Galactica): minced oath


• a phrase that appears at the end of a sentence to sum up what has just been said--a kind of recapitulation like this: summative modifier


• a word that carries within it a synonym of itself, such as devilish (evil): kangaroo word


• an adverb--such as high, fast, and hard--that has the same form as its corresponding adjective: flat adverb


• a nonsensical piece of writing (most famously, perhaps, Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"): amphigory


• a noise, gesture, word, or expression used by a listener to show that she's paying attention to a speaker (Uh-huh): back-channel signal


• an ambiguous headline ("Stolen Painting Found by Tree"): crash blossom


• the substitution of a title or descriptive phrase for a proper name--as when Sawyer (in the TV program Lost) addresses his hefty companion Hurley as JumboTron or International House of Pancakes: antonomasia

You'll find examples and explanations of these and over 1,000 other language-related words and phrases in our Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms.

More Words About Words:

• There's a Name for It: Twenty Weird and Wonderful Language-Related Terms
• Gadzooks! There's a Name for It (Part Four)
• Are You Crazy? There's a Name for It (Part Five)