It seems that no matter how hard people try (myself included) there are always errors and omissions when a book comes to print. Here are some belated details that should have been caught:

uvula – The entry for uvula (page 92) does not describe the function of this little dangly bit that you can see hanging at the back of your mouth over your throat. On September 3, 2007 I was lucky enough to be a guest on the Ronn Owens show with guest host Gil Gross. One of the callers (Chuck) told us that he was uvula-less after an operation and because of it was well aware that the uvula was a kind of sensing mechanism telling the throat when food or drink was on its way down to keep us from choking by closing off the passage to the lungs.

back dimples – David, another caller from San Francisco said that some people have dimples at the base of their backs, one on each side of the spine, and asked what they were called. This isn’t a place that I’d researched or I’d have certainly come up with either dimples of Venus or fossae lumbales laterales. There’s even a Wikipedia entry for the things!

weenis – Jeremy from Gilroy asked me what the skin on your elbow was called. I said it didn’t have a name. But I’ve since been informed that it does indeed have a name and that name is weenis. This isn’t a word that appears in any established official type dictionaries that I can see. I also did a search within books at Amazon.com and came up empty, but there is definitely an entry for weenis at Urbandictionary.com and it seems fairly widely popularly supported in the slang world.

sneeze – on page 232 of the book I describe how the word sneeze came about as a printer’s error. This was because someone mistook a “long s” for an “f.” The example of what a “long s” looks like is not as illustrative as I’d like. Doesn’t ſ look easier to confuse with f than ſ with f? At any rate ſ is certainly easier to recognize as a “long s.”

head line – on page 22 of the book I mention that linen is so called because it is made up of threads and the threads are small lines. Sallie Goetsch kindly mentioned the book in her blog and pointed out an error I made in reversing this relationship. In fact linen is named after the Greek word for flax, the plant that it’s made of. Instead of linen taking its name from fine lines of thread, it is instead line that takes its name from linen.

hiccup – See this post.