I love the word zyxnoid. It is a sniglet, that is, a word somebody made up because there was no word for what it was made up for. A zyxnoid is defined as the strange and improbable word you create when you are doing a crossword puzzle and can’t figure out what goes in the last blank square, so you put any old letter.
My liking for the word stems from my own experience working crossword puzzles. I admit I have been known to create zyxnoids when I have been stuck. Besides, I just like the sound of the word.
So, imagine my delight in having discovered that I have an ancestor whose last name was Zyx. Yes, Ursula Zyx, born about 1520 in Germany, probably Bavaria, perhaps Augsburg. She married Hans Killian, and their descendants, a couple hundred years later, left Germany for the new world, starting out in North Carolina, then pioneering west to Tennessee and finally to Illinois.
I’ve sat here several minutes trying to think of a punch line for this story and coming up with nothing. I guess Great-Grandma Zyx is not as inspirational as I had hoped.
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