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Vanity Of Vanities, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

I happened to be driving down the road recently when a bright red sports car went by bearing the vanity license plate 4 MY EGO. Then and there came a dazzling revelation: the whole subject of vanity license plates as a vehicle for wordplay has recieved very little attention from logologists.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

End Play, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

You are working on a crossword puzzle and the grid shows _EAR. Without an additional clue you would not know whether the missing letter was a B, D, F, G, H, L, N, P, R, S, T or W. All this proves is that many English words have similar contructions with only one letter different, a fact exploited by certain prize puzzle constructors who devise fiendishly clever puzzles which appear to have two or more correct answers. Only by following their tortuous logic can you divine the acceptable solution.

Verbal Hypertension, David Morice

Word Ways

By expanding the number of English verb tenses, we can express our temporal experiences more precisely. Beyond the old-fashioned Future Perfect ("I will have walked") lie new tenses just waiting for us to go boldly where no grammarian has gone before.

The Albatros In Ferdinand Bolstraat, Rudy Kousbroek

Word Ways

Editor's Note: The following story, the second chapter of de logologische Ruimte (Meulenhoff, 1984), exhibits the odd juxtapositions that result from transaddition (adding letters to a word and rearranging to form another word).

The First Double And Triple Acrostics, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Double and triple acrostics occupy an important niche in the history of word puzzles, it is generally recognized that they were the predecessors to the crossword puzzle. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a double acrostic consists of clues for a sequence of words (the cross-lights) to be written in a list, plus two clues to the words spelled out by the first and last letters of the cross-lights (the uprights). In a triple acrostic a third upright is formed out of interior letters in the cross-lights. The cross-lights may consist of words of varying lengths, but the uprights are …

Genealogic, David Morice

Word Ways

FATHER, MOTHER, and a few other genealogical words (DAD, MOM, POP, MA, PA, GRANDFATHER, GRANDMOTHER, etc.) have the unusual property of generating sentences that are true or false, depending on the number of words used and how they are read.

On The Table, Henri Picciotto

Word Ways

Although I hope it is not too easy, this cryptic crossword is elementary.

Kickshaws, Murray Pearce

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

The Only Man Infinity Fears, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

John Candelaria of Yucaipa, California is a man who leads two lives. At work he is a mild-mannered Clark Kent, scientific illustrator and surveyor at Caltrans (occuped with traffic-flow studies and highway planning); at home, he becomes the man of steel, effortlessly vaulting past such mega-numbers as the googol (one followed by one hundred zeros) the googolplex (ten raised to the googol power), Archimedes' number (one followed by 80 quadrillion zeros, and Graham's number (a number so immense that it takes a page of specially-invented notation to define it).

A Name Game, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

When I was at Princeton, we called it the Princeton Name Game and argued that the challenge was to invent a name that would completely conquer the admissions director and gain the bearer instant acceptance.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 19, Number 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

The Palindromes Of Mangareva, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Mangareva is the largest of the Gambier Islands, a small group situated within the Tuamotu Archipelago in the the eastern Pacific. The Islands were discovered by Captain Wilson of the "Duff" on 25 May 1797, and he named them after the British naval commander Admiral Lord Gambier.

Some New Long Transposals, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Over the years Word Ways has published numerous transposals, groups of words such as CARTHORSE/ORCHESTRA and TRANSPIRE/TERRAPINS. Recently I went on a transposal-finding spree, setting myself the target of finding exactly one hundred new sets of transposals involving words of ten or more letters.

The Most Fecund Consonyms, Dana Richards

Word Ways

Words that have the same pattern of consonants, such as BeTRaY and oBiTuaRY, euTHaNaSia and aTHeNS, SPoNGe and eSPioNaGe, KNoW and oKiNaWa, iCHNeuMoN and CHiNaMan, and oRCHeSTRa and RoCHeSTeR, are known as consonyms.

Letter Perfect, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Many logologists have noted that most of the letters in our alphanet sound like English words. To take four example, CUE and QUEUE sound like the letter Q, ARE sounds like R, EWE, YOU and YEW sound like the letter U, and WHY sounds like Y.

Pneumonoultramicrostuff, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

In 1932, Frank Scully wrote Fun In Bed, a book of light-hearted anecdotes and puzzles for the diversion and amusement of the hospitalized patient.

English And What Does She Mean?, Charlton Lawrence Edholm

Word Ways

I had just been reading an impassioned denunciation of one more attempt to force a simplified system of spelling down the throat of a long-suffering public. All my literary sympathies were engaged in the phrase "The noble old language of Chaucer and Shakespeare is sufficiantly simplified for us" when a newly-landed friend from Berlin approached and began his daily course in "English and What does She Mean?"

A Verse Of Necromancy, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

"Lieutenant Arthur Jamison." A stocky middle-aged man with black hair streaked with gray looked up at me.

I handed him my card. "Miss Rose Anderson said you had no objection if I discussed with you the disappearance of her fiance, Homer Rosswell."

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles in this issue along with instructions to authors.

Four Byte Word Text News, John Henrick

Word Ways

Had he been a novelist, rather than a lyricist, Cole Porter might never have made the musical claim that contemporary novelists use only four-letter words in their writings. Whether the assertion is viewed as prevarication or exaggeration, one thing is clear. No known novel, present or past, has the characteristic proclaimed in "Anything Goes."

Front Cover And Publication Information - Volume 19, Number 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Ad Memoriam Demetrii, Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

The Wombat was, I could tell, in a somber mood when he recieved me in his rural retreat in Fauquier County, Virginia. His dark clothing seemed to reflext his frame of mind; and on the Florentine credenza stood, not the colorful array of comestibles which I was wont to see there, but a large bedewed pitcher of nearly black liquid, a silver plate of black chocolate confections, and a platter, likewise argent, of delicate sandwiches of some black bread.

All End-Letters Different In A Poem, Willard R. Espy

Word Ways

In the July 22, 1972 New Yorker magazine there appeared the following sonnet by George Starbuck...

Dudeney's Lost Word-Puzzle, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most readers of Word Ways are aware that Henry Ernest Dudeney, England's most distinguished puzzleist, was interested in words as well as numbers.

A Puzzling Past, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

The year is 1896. You live on a small farm in upstate New York. The cows have been milked, the pigs slopped, supper eaten and the dishes washed, and you and your wife sit down by the light of a kerosene lamp and several candles to read the latest issue of the weekly newsmagazine, The American Agriculturalist.

Dr. Awkward And Olson In Oslo, Lawrence Levine

Word Ways

The long voyage between my first tentative effort at constructing a short palindrome of some forty letters, and the eventual completion of a palindromic novel numbering 31,594 words (or approximately 104,000 letters) some twenty years later, was an unrelenting lesson in many disciplines. There were lessons in trial and error, in logic, in vocabulary, in syntactics, and a wide-ranging lexical development that I never thought possible. Although I had always considered myself a more than ordinary lover of my native language, I had never before realized how metamorphic and submissive was this extraordinary English tongue, until the day I began …

Mary Had A Univocalic Lamb, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

According to Tony Augarde's Oxford Guide to Word Games, univocalics are writings that make use of only one vowel. This is apparently an old form of word play, as Augarde gives several examples from the nineteenth century, including one that dates back to 1824.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Monogrammonyms, Jay Ames

Word Ways

Some time ago I read an article on one-letter surnames as listed by the United States Internal Revenue Service, and a similar one by the Immigration Department.