Today's word: Ucalegon (n.) a neighbour whose house is on fire.

Ucalegon was a counsellor in ancient Troy who had his house set on fire. Apparently, in the late seventeenth century, someone decided we needed a specific word in English to describe such an individual. Who'd have thought?

My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.

Thanks for reading.

Image by LukeBam06 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or FAL], from Wikimedia Commons

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