IN A chain of association that estimable journal The Ladyis more likely to prompt "embroidery patterns" than "syzygy", but thisoddball and perfectly -justifed reply would denote a person of rare intelligenceand wit.

It was in The Lady, in 1891, that Lewis Carroll firstpublished a syzygy after it had been rejected by Vanity Fair. The ideacame to him 12 years earlier, from the Greek for yoke, which, in this case,are the adjacent letters shared, or made to share, by opposite words, asin dog and cat: dog; endogen; gentry; intricate; cat.

It can get far more complicated, and deserves a placein the OED amid the mathematical, biological, astronomical, prosodicaland religious senses, from which Carroll's syzygy is a fortifying diversion.