From Alex Forsyth
Paul Dove’s idea of backwardly-spelled words for reversed or inverted actions is fun, but not original (Feedback, 19 November). Anyone familiar with the writings of Terry Pratchett will have come across “knurd”, a state of excessive sobriety that strips away the cosy mental fog that prevents people from being overwhelmed by their insignificance in the immensity of the universe. People suffering from this condition require alcohol just to bring them back to “normality”.
From Dan Huisjen
When a knitter makes a mistake and must remove a few stitches, one at a time, in order to get back to the site of the mistake and correct it, they are said to “tink”.
Brooksville, Maine, US
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From Barrie Wells
The Welsh language has two words for “now”: rwan and nawr. The former is more prevalent in the South, the latter more prevalent in the North.
Deganwy, Conwy, UK
From Andrew Fogg
It would be very handy to be able to pord something, and I knilb at the clock lots of times every morning. It struck me that an example of the genre has been current in my family for many years: “zzub” has always been our word for the noise that bees make when they fly backwards.
Thinking of things working backwards, you’ll be pleased to hear that in a fine piece of nominative antideterminism, one of my father’s hobbyhorses during his long career in environmental health was clean air.
Great Gransden, Cambridgeshire, UK
Farnham, Surrey, UK
