Weird-looking words—I love 'em! Thanks to the American Physical Society a fresh one crossed my screen recently: pnictide. A pnictide is a Group 15 element, in the Periodic Table column that includes nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth; it's from the Greek for "choking". Certain pnictides form a new class of high-temperature superconductor.

And quite by chance a couple of days ago a friend I was running with told me about the psoas muscle, pronounced something like "so as". It's part of the hip flexors, and psoas problems may be connected to piriformis syndrome, a sciatic nerve disorder. Interesting stretches can help loosen the psoas.

So pnow I have a pair of pnew leading-silent-p pwords, to go along with pneumonia, pseudonym, psycho, pterodactyl, and Psmith, the pfictional pcharacter by P. G. Wodehouse pwhom I pneed to pread pmore of ...

(cf. FascinatingWords (2001-12-02), ...) - ^z - 2009-08-19