In 1871, Edward Lear, a Victorian artist and author, wrote a book of nonsense verse that included this passage from a poem called “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”: “They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon.” Over the next twenty years, other runcible items appeared in Lear’s poetry, including a runcible goose, a runcible cat, a runcible hat, a runcible wall, and one more runcible spoon. In all these poems, the meaning of the word runcible is unknown: Lear invented it out of thin air simply because he liked the sound of it. In the early twentieth century, however, someone bestowed the word upon an actual piece of cutlery used to serve appetizers—a spoon whose bowl ends in three curved prongs, the last of which has a cutting edge.