A word-nerd love story:

I asked him how an avid dictionary reader comes to date a former lexicographer, and he told me he’d been hired to move her furniture. While he was in her apartment, her little dog kept barking until the lexicographer said, “Hush, Pumpernickel!” Shea couldn’t contain himself: “Do you know the etymology of ‘pumpernickel’?” he asked. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she replied. (The German is, roughly: flatulent goblin.)

From The Lexicographer and the Madman, posted on the NY Times Papercuts blog.