cockeyed

Crooked, absurd, drunk, or having a squint.

It is, of course, more difficult to make the spaces as well as the letters symmetrical. The best I can do at present is the following:

No pay? God, pets! I spot Bateman. No tub, but on nametab tops I step. Dog, yap on!

You are invited to make up palindromic sentences, or palindromic combinations of sentences. Here are some of mine:

Raw fog of war.
Mac's top nurses run pot scam.
No, Seville's mad damsel lives on.
No parts or clever Arsenal bar togs, eh? He's got Rab Lane's rare velcro strap on.

Carolina doesn't qualify because it is not a commonzation, but a proper noun from a proper noun. Ditto for Dickensian . The meaning of the latter word hasn't changed, either. But Georgia , Georgian and Rabelaisian are included. (I was thinking of Dickensian in the sense of 'squalid, poverty-stricke...

Some other eponyms not in the list:

Carolina (from the Latin form of 'Charles', i.e. King Charles II)
cordwainer (from 'Cordoba')
Dickensian
landau (from the German city of that name)

sheepish

Looking embarrassed or ashamed.

Probably from the sense of 'submissive', like a sheep.

'Stand' in 'stand corrected' may be a copula, but I am quite sure that 'wage' in 'wage war' and 'throw' in 'throw a party' are ordinary transitive verbs, meaning 'conduct' and 'arrange' respectively. 'War' and 'party' are direct objects, not subject complements like 'fool' in 'I feel a fool' or 'nic...

It seems that cohort and exhort are etymologically unrelated to each other. But I wonder if one influenced the other at any point.

What is the correct grammatical analysis of "I stand corrected"? Is 'stand' here an intransitive verb with independent meaning, as in "I stand firm" or "I stood transfixed with fear"? Or is it merely a linking verb (copula), equivalent to "I am in a corrected state"? The latter explanation would mak...

fun (noun)

Originally a verb meaning 'to cheat' or 'to trick', then a noun meaning 'trick', 'deception', and acquiring its current sense in the 18th century.

The attributive adjectival use (e.g. 'a fun game') is recent.

I don't understand how burke and berk can be regarded as versions of the same word. Burke is derived from William Burke and means 'cover up' or 'suffocate'; berk comes from 'Berkshire (or Berkeley?) Hunt' and means 'fool'. Different origin, different meaning.

standard (noun or adjective) Here is a word with many meanings. The military sense, of a raised banner carried in battle, seems to be the original one. How it acquired its other meanings is not clear. A standard may be a measure of excellence, or on the other hand it may refer to something that is ...

iron

This word has an interesting etymology, as described here. Note the anomalous pronunciation, and the various different meanings.

It is unrelated to irony (with pronounced 'r') and ironic.

cappuccino Originally from Italian cappuccino meaning 'Capuchin monk'. The monks (who wore light brown robes, similar to the light brown of the drink) were named after the Italian word cappuccio , meaning 'hood'. According to Wiktionary, the Italian word for the monk was borrowed by Viennese German...

imbue, imbrue How closely are these two words (with similar meanings) etymologically related? They are apparently both connected to the Latin verb bibere (to drink), but do they have any closer connection than that? I was unfamiliar with "imbrue" until I found it on the list of Good Words just now ...