Words, words, words. Here’s something neat:

A.Word.A.Day, a website and listserv giving out a word a day. Today’s word:

Canossa (kuh-NOS-uh, Italian: kah-NOS-sah) noun

A place of humiliation or penance. Mostly used in the form “go to Canossa”: to humble or humiliate oneself, to eat humble pie.

[From the name of a castle in Canossa, a village in Italy, where Holy Roman emperor Henry IV sought pardon before Pope Gregory VII in 1077.]

“If I were to believe what you do about the policies of Russia there would be no way out for me but to crawl to Canossa … ” Edward S. Shapiro; Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War; M. E. Sharpe, 1995. (full-text on Questia)

Many more quotes are provided. Other cool stuff at the website, www.wordsmith.org, includes the Internet Anagram Server (“I, Rearrangement Servant”). Lee Kenyon becomes (among an exhaustive list) “Kneel Ye No” and “Elk None Ye.”DeAnna Knippling becomes “A ad-penning plink,” “A England Pink Pen,” “A planned plinking,” “A dang link pin pen,” “A dank nipple ginn,” “A planning de plink,” “Panda penning ilk.” Rachael becomes “A cake her nylon,” “A clean rye honk,” and “Channeler OK.”

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