Wordplay: Offbeat origins, from miniskirts to snakes

What's the nine-letter word hiding in OPILOIFTRO? The Target puzzle asks such a question daily. Sometimes the answer will jump out. Other times, no matter the number of tweaks, the best you can manage is ROOFPILOT.

Which isn't a word, but the idea's fun. Bruce Ashley will often ignore the nine-letter word to create the likes of PROTOFILO (experimental pastry), PROFITLOO (a coin-operated dunny) or TOILPROOF: resistant to labour. Theory being, you play around long enough, you'll end up with the answer.

My brain travels along similar tangents, I replied, as that's part of maintaining a word column. Plenty of people send in stories, puzzle rants, word questions, and responding is only polite. Over the silly season, where normal citizens received books and vouchers, I copped umpteen linguistic conundrums threatening TO FOIL PRO.

For example, Balmain's Cathy Morgan asked: "If duckling is a small duck, then why isn't feeling a discounted tariff, possibly paid with changeling, or a buckling?" Cathy's logic is sound, just as garbling should be a miniskirt, while crackling is a Dad joke.

All chuckling aside, Stan Carey, a Macmillan Dictionary columnist, and blogmeister of the excellent Sentence First, recently dug up cheeseling from the 1700s – a small portion of cheese. "I'm reviving it immediately," he declared.

Indeed, ancient words seemed a theme in my latest mailbag. John Pickard found a rarity from 1814. Reading A History of Discoveries and Inventions from that period, John found a German quote concerning astronomical clocks. The same quote was then translated by author Johann Beckmann, or "Englished", as he put. Surely one of the weirder verbifications within our solar system.

Melbourne's Rosalie Ferretti went one better. A textile designer with an appetite for fashion history, Rosalie encountered the quaint word quaintise in her research. Last month, Rosalie wrote to Wordplay seeking a semantic footnote.

Quaint has quite a colourful bio, in fact. The word stems from cognitus in Latin, or known. That sense then transmuted into cointe, Old French for cunning, or ingenious. Medieval English then combined those nuances into quaint, plus its neglected cousin, quaintise, meaning subtlety, or craft. Geoffrey Chaucer aired the word in 1340, translating the French verse The Romance of the Rose. Disguise was deemed the principal art of quaintise.

Lin Sinton, a Sydney reader, had his own archaism to decipher. "Last night I was watching The Last of the Mohicans where one Chingachgook features." On TV, the name was pronounced as it looks (chin-garch-gook)." But then a little reading became a dangerous thing for Lin, as he consulted Oxford Companion to English Literature. There Chingachgook is said to echo Chicago.