Nuts and Bolts: quimp.

 This isn't a very useful word, really, except possibly at Scrabble*, but it's still quite cool.

Quimps sometimes appear in those maledicta balloons, the ones we were playing with last week in The Word Den. They're the speech bubbles in cartoons where symbols take the place of words that are literally unprintable because they're taboo.

Well, a quimp is the symbol that looks like the planet Saturn.

Told you it wasn't very useful.

Word To Feel Quite Smug About Knowing Today: quimp. No one seems to know where this word originated. My guess is that someone's made up a a quirky kind of word for a quirky kind of thing. And why not?

*Sadly, and unjustly, I think, it turns out that quimp isn't actually allowable in official Scrabble contests.