Recently I saw a sign in the subway listing rules of conduct. One read "no graffiti or scratchiti." I was curious about this strange word, clearly referring to the vandalism of the subway's easily scratched windows with knives, keys, and the like, but later forgot about it. Then yesterday on the way to work someone got on my otherwise empty car and made some scratchiti, while his girlfriend critiqued it ("you made it all ugly"). This time I checked the OED, and didn't find it, though it's an established word elsewhere on the web. What I did find out from the OED is that graffiti, an Italian word, is actually the plural of graffito. This places it with 'data' in that rarefied group of words whose plural is almost always used in place of its singular, and whose singular form can be employed to great pretentious effect. Also, it originally referred to art on walls in ancient Rome and Pompeii that wasn't vandalism at all, and in fact was sometimes specifically stuff scratched on walls to reveal another color below the paint (or whatever they had then). So it was really quite unnecessary to invent 'scratchiti.'

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Sometimes words and phrases pop into one's life in the strangest ways. The other day two people who don't know one another both used the phrase "cockles of your heart" in my presence, which I had heard for the first time a few days before, but I don't even remember where. OED Time: there are actually about 10 completely different words that are all called "cockle:" 8 nouns, 1 adjective and 3 verbs. It's a plant, a bump or pucker in a surface, and a misspelling of "cocke" (now cock) in Samuel Johnson's dictionary that persisted. But for our current purposes, it's the English name of a bivalve mollusc, perhaps more commonly known as the cockle-shell, first citation 1393. In the 1600s it was extended to be other things shaped like the cockle-shell. In the same century, someone decided to say "did inwardly rejoice the cockles of his heart." The OED doesn't bother defining what exactly the cockles of one's heart are, but they are always referred to as the part that is rejoiced or delighted or warmed. It gives two eminently reasonable explanations for the phrase: that the cockle-shell rather resembles the heart in shape, and that the zoological name for the cockle is "Cardium." It seems likely to me that the latter itself was caused by the former.

The Cockle-Shell