Trivia (Couldn't Think Of A Word To Describe The Category)

1. X is a term used to refer to a mishearing of a phrase or song lyrics that results in an entirely different interpretation. It was coined by American author Sylvia Wright in 1954 in an essay entitled ‘The Death of Lady X’, based upon the following lines her mother used to read to her as a child:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They have slain the Earl of Murray,
And laid him on the green.

What is X?

2. When the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary was being compiled, its chemistry editor sent in a request asking for the letter D to be listed as an abbreviation for ‘density’. However, the typist misunderstood and ended up adding to the dictionary a word that didn’t even exist. This ‘ghost word’ remained an undetected entry for five years between ‘Dorcopsis’ and ‘doré’ . What was the word?

3. In graphic design, this pseudo-Latin phrase acts as a label for a rather famous pangrammatic piece of text (that is, containing all the letters of the alphabet, like the well-known “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”). It is used solely for the purpose of showcasing font and typesetting, and does not really have a meaning, although a close English translation is said to be ‘pain itself’. Everyone who’s ever used a computer has seen it hundreds of times and possibly wondered what it means. What is the phrase?

4. This word originally meant ‘suitcase’, but was later used by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass to mean a word made by blending two other words together (for eg. staycation, brunch, smog). It comes from the French words for ‘to carry’ and ‘coat’, which means it is itself an example of what it describes. What word?

5. Yeah, so, there’s like this whole language that Wikipedia totally describes as, like, this “American sociolect, originally of Southern California, in particular Valley girls”. And it was like, popularized by this 1982 song by Frank Zappa called ‘Valley Girl’. Whatever, anyway, now everybody uses it, not just high school bimbos. So it’s got, like, a name or something, y’know?

6. Maltron, InScript, Colemak, PLUM, HCESAR, FITALY and Svorak are types of what?