The secret of nym

I'm a writer, and writers love words. We like playing with them. Writing them, rearranging then, substituting for them, playing around with rhyme and cadence and structure. It's why I love doing crossword puzzles, and especially why I love puns -- layering double meanings into just a few words is an intellectual challenge as well as an exercise in humor. So I was thinking about words recently, looking for a synonym of a word, when I realized something: