Word To Use Today: escritoire.

 Lewis Carroll's mad Hatter famously asked Why is a raven like a writing desk?

He asked this question in Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, and Alice never found out the answer because there wasn't one. That was the point. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician, and he was fed up with the pointless logic-chopping popular among mathematicians at the time.

But since then, more or less everyone has tried to find an answer. Aldous Huxley might have come up with the best, providing a neat non-answer to the non-question: 

Because there is a 'b' in both and an 'n' in neither.

In fact poor old Lewis Carroll was besieged by so many letters of enquiry from fans that in the end he did come up with an answer to his riddle, which he put into the introduction of a new edition. I hope it stopped the enquiries, even though a misprint meant part of the joke didn't really work:

Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!

(The word never should have been written nevar...geddit?)

No, it's still not very good. Ah well.

An escritoire is a writing desk, of course, but the word escritoire is much more fun to say.

Do enjoy the lovely French throat-clearing noise at the end when you say it.

Word To Use Today: escritoire. In Mediaeval times a scriptōrium was a writing room in a monastery. The word comes from the Latin word scrībere. to write.