Q. I'm looking for a word or phrase that describes a statement like "it's not the worst I've ever seen" or "he's not the dumbest person ever," which offers praise in the form of a negative ("it's not," "he's not") combined with a derogatory statement ("the worst," "the dumbest").

A. The word you are looking for is most likely litotes. A rhetorical device, litotes is a form of understatement in which an affirmative statement is made by means of a negative expression of a contrary statement.

"He's not the dumbest person ever," would be an example of litotes if it were used as an understated alternative to "He's pretty smart."

Q. Are there any words in the English language that have no vowels?

A. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, lists the following words that contain no vowels (including Y):

• sh — interjection, meaning "be quiet"
• cwm — noun, pronounced \KOOM\, defined in the Collegiate Dictionary as "a deep steep-walled basin on a mountain usually forming the blunt end of a valley." It is from the Welsh word meaning "valley"
• nth — adjective, as in "to the nth degree"
• tsk — interjection, used to express disapproval

Some other dictionaries also include some interjections which are not included in the Collegiate Dictionary. These would include hm (or hmm), mm, brr (or brrr), pst (or psst), shh, zzz, and pfft.

One may also sometimes come across the word "pwn" (pronounced \PON\) which developed in online circles as a deliberate typo of "own" and is used synonymously with own in the sense of defeating someone usually in a spectacular or humiliating way ("I totally owned/pwned him in our last match"). We have not come across any standard dictionary that yet includes pwn in its vocabulary.

Q. I was trying to find a word my grandparents and great-grandparents once used but which I do not hear anymore: klediment. My forebears pronounced it \CLAD-IH-MENT\ and used it to mean "clutter." Could you help me with this word and its definition?

A. The word that you are looking for is clatterment. The variant klediment is a spelling based upon the word's pronunciation. Clatterment is entered in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) as a word that is part of the dialect of the mountain people of eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia. In 1979 June Carter Cash published her autobiography under the title Among My Klediments. In the book she wrote, "A klediment can be a thing you love. . . . A klediment can be a thing you just won't throw away. . . . A klediment can be a person dear to you." DARE believes that the word may be related to the Scottish words clatter-traps or clutterment.

Q. When did the definition of surfing take on the additional reference to using the Internet?

A. The earliest examples we have on hand for the use of surf as it is applied to browsing the Internet in search of something of interest go back to 1993. The word appears to have really caught on in this sense around 1994 or 1995. During this time, occurrences of this sense of surf in print were frequently accompanied by a brief gloss or definition explaining this particular usage.

In 1998, a new intransitive sense of surf "to scan a wide range of offerings for something of interest" and a transitive sense "to scan the offerings of (as television or the Internet) for something of interest" were added to the 20th printing of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition.