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Semi-Pseudo-Plurals And Semi-Quasi-Pseudo-Plurals, T.A. Hall
Semi-Pseudo-Plurals And Semi-Quasi-Pseudo-Plurals, T.A. Hall
Word Ways
A recent perusal of Webster's Third New International Dictionary has uncovered a number of pseudo-plurals and quasi-pseudo-plurals that were not included in my article in the last issue of this journal. These new examples are listed in Figure 1 and Figure 2 respectively.
Back Cover
Word Ways
Back cover, including a tribute to Howard W. Bergerson by Zorn Radisavljevic.
Josephus Words, Dana Richards
Josephus Words, Dana Richards
Word Ways
In the articles on "Magic Spells" (Word Ways, Feb and May 2010) it was proposed that tricks could be performed with a deck of n letter cards. The deck would be prearranged, spelling some word u. There would be a "skip sequence" of integers k1, k2, ..., kn; the more natural the sequence the better.
Eskimo Words For Sea-Ice, A. Ross Eckler
Eskimo Words For Sea-Ice, A. Ross Eckler
Word Ways
Linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum demolished the Boas-Whorf claim that there are 200 Eskimo words for snow, in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. A new version of this myth shows up in Mariana Gosnell's Ice.
Pieces Of Centaurs, Mike Keith
Pieces Of Centaurs, Mike Keith
Word Ways
The poem below is a sequel to "Octopi" (WW, Feb. 2009, p. 43) and obeys a similar lexical constraint to its predecessor. There is a hint regarding the constraint hidden in each stanza. What is the constraint, can you find the eight hints?
Iambic Double Vowel Shift Cascades, A. Anil
Iambic Double Vowel Shift Cascades, A. Anil
Word Ways
VOWEL (SHIFT) CASCADES (02-53,192) are sentential or meaningful WORD LADDERS that run thru the vowels in one spot, eg, Bad bed bid bod bud. (Bedbugs, VD or pregnancy?) Vowel cascades can also be PHONIC: Bait beat: "Bite!" bought boot (The Shoe of the Fisherman). Susan Thorpe (11-155) calls meaningless examples of PHONETIC VOWEL ROTATIONS, although rotator has a prior wordplay meaning as a non-mirror word inversion like up/dn (see up/dn). She gives many good non-sentential examples with long vowel sounds but ignores short vowels.
Special Numerical Tautonymic Charades, Susan Thorpe
Special Numerical Tautonymic Charades, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
In Numerical Charades Part 4 (Word Ways Feb. 2011 p. 34), I offered a new type of numerical tautonym, specifically the numerical tautonymic charade.
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 44 Number 3
Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 44 Number 3
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.
Celebration Of Mind, Scott Hudson, Tom Rodgers
Celebration Of Mind, Scott Hudson, Tom Rodgers
Word Ways
Information about the second Martin Gardner Celebration of Mind.
Supermarket, Martin Gardner
Playing With Accordion Words, Richard Lederer
Playing With Accordion Words, Richard Lederer
Word Ways
Garnering twelve Academy Award nominations and four Oscars, including Best Picture, The King's Speech became, on February 28, the most honored film of the year. Among its many excellencies is the double entendre in its title. The word Speech in The King's Speech means the speaking of George VI, the stammerer who did not want to become king. At the same time and in the same space, the word Speech means the particular address, in 1939, that King George VI delivered to his British subjects exhorting them to join in battle against the Germans.
Front Cover And Publication Information
Front Cover And Publication Information
Word Ways
Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.
Kickshaws, David Morice
Say Cheese!, Steve Kahan
Say Cheese!, Steve Kahan
Word Ways
To elicit a smile, a photographer will often ask his subject to "say cheese." Imagine his astonishment if the response he received were a list of twenty different varieties of cheese. That is precisely what appears below in a somewhat disguised format. Each of the words presented there contains an errant letter. Identify it, replace it with another, and permute the resulting collection to reveal the answer. Twenty out of twenty entitles you to be dubbed a big cheese!
Anagram Arithmetic, A. Anil
Anagram Arithmetic, A. Anil
Word Ways
There are only two known pure number name anagram equations in English except rearrangements of their words. Naturally I exclude the infinite tautologies that swap whole digits. It's a matter of opinion whether to count tautologies that swap a non-digit suffix. Such suffix swaps occur in the teens in Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, transliterated Russian, Slovene and Arabic, and no doubt other languages, but not Dutch, Welsh or transliterated Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese or Japanese.
"X" Marks The Spot, Steve Kahan
"X" Marks The Spot, Steve Kahan
Word Ways
Indeed, "X" does mark the spot - in this case, the final spot - in the twenty words that this quiz solicits. The remaining, arranged alphabetically, require suitable permutation prior to attachment of the letter "X" at the end of each. A perfect score here is "X"cellent!
The Forgone Limericks Of Lewis Carroll, Jim Puder
The Forgone Limericks Of Lewis Carroll, Jim Puder
Word Ways
For a fact, Lewis Carroll was well acquainted with limericks from an early age onward. We know this because there has come down to us a set of four original limericks which he "published" when he was only thirteen and still best known as Charles Dodgson. It is also the case that Carroll could hardly have failed to notice the phenomenon when, over the next few decades, Edward Lear's several books of illustrated limericks met with enormous popular success. And it is certainly true that, over the course of his writing career, Carroll published a good deal of light verse …
"Let's Push The Envelope Out Of The Box": More Mixed And Mashed Metaphors, Don Hauptman
"Let's Push The Envelope Out Of The Box": More Mixed And Mashed Metaphors, Don Hauptman
Word Ways
I last wrote about mixed metaphors in in the November 2008 issue of Word Ways. A friend who read that article chastised me because not all the examples I cited meet the strict definition of a mixed metaphor. After some consideration, I conceded that she had a point.
The Art Of Magic, Oscar Thumpbindle
The Art Of Magic, Oscar Thumpbindle
Word Ways
On anyone's list of the world's greatest mathemagicians the name Arthur Benjamin would most certainly appear. He has recently been showing a truly astounding mathematical card trick. I first saw Art present it at a Gathering for Gardner and later saw him give it again at a Mathematical Association of America regional meeting. The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 95, No. 531, Nov. 2010 contains "To your hearts' content" by Hang Chen and Curtis Cooper which describes the trick. They said "Arthur Benjamin showed the amazing mathematical card trick during the 2007 annual meeting of the AMS/MAA in New Orleans."
More Spoonerism Riddles, Jim Puder
More Spoonerism Riddles, Jim Puder
Word Ways
Charmed by Will Shortz's collection, in the last Word Ways, of original riddles based on spoonerisms, I whacked my writs to come up with a durther fuzzin' examples, and beer's the hunch.
Pseudo-Plurals Vs. Quasi-Pseudo-Plurals, T. A. Hall
Pseudo-Plurals Vs. Quasi-Pseudo-Plurals, T. A. Hall
Word Ways
Imagine a pair of singular nouns A and B in which B but not A contains a letter at its right edge correspondign to the letter used to express plurality. If A and B are otherwise orthographically identical, I refer to the latter as the pseudo-plural of the former. Pseudo-plurals are very different from pseudo-comparatives. The reason is that triplets like these do not consistently belong to the same word class. By contrast, the words A and B described above most both be (singular) nouns. For reasons that will be clear below, I consider first the nature of pseudo-plurals in …
Fecund Phonetics, Susan Thorpe
Fecund Phonetics, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
The same letter, or group of letters, can have different pronunciations and hence be represented by different phonetic symbols. This is demonstrated in Unusual Words and Arbitrary Words. Conversely, the same phonetic symbol can represent different letters or groups of letters. For example, both the E and I in PHONETIST are pronounced as is the I in PIT. A phonetist is a person versed in phonetics. Each of the words below has more than one identical phonetic symbol represented by a different letter or group of letters. The phonetic symbol is given first, together with the different letter/letter groups …
More On Pseudoantonyms, T. A. Hall
More On Pseudoantonyms, T. A. Hall
Word Ways
In an article in the last issue of this journal, Anil uncovered a number of examples of pseudoantonyms in the realm of English negatory prefixes. A pseudoantonym consists of an affixed word and the corresponding unaffixed base which one would expect to be antonyms on the basis of the meaning of the affix, but which are instead synonyms (or near synonyms). For example, the prefix DE- has a primary meaning "to do the opposite of" in examples such as ACTIVATE ~ DEACTIVATE, but not in FEND DEFEND. Since the latter two words can be synonymous, they are pseudoantonyms.
No No No (No, Nay, Never....), Edward R. Wolpow
No No No (No, Nay, Never....), Edward R. Wolpow
Word Ways
We are cautioned in grade school to avoid use of the double negative -- that logically, the 2 negatives cancel out, and if that is not the intention of the writer, confusion rules. But multiple negatives do abound, and not merely for emphasis as is "No, no a thousand times no...."
Digitalised Numerical Tautonyms, Susan Thorpe
Digitalised Numerical Tautonyms, Susan Thorpe
Word Ways
Numerical Tautonyms include words such as CRE.ATE, in which the alphabetical numerical total of the first half of the word is equal to that of the second half of the word.
Hot-Pad: A New Puzzle-Game, Jeremiah Farrell
Hot-Pad: A New Puzzle-Game, Jeremiah Farrell
Word Ways
The Puzzle: The twelve tokens are to be placed on the playing board so that each triangle contains, on its nodes, a transposal of HOT-PAD. On the back cover is a large copy of the playing grid. Another way of looking at the puzzle is to note that the tokens on any two nodes adjoined by a line have no letter in common.
Punk Whiz 14: State Of The Pun, A. Anil
Punk Whiz 14: State Of The Pun, A. Anil
Word Ways
In this mostly easy pun quiz all the answers are states or provinces of the US, Canada or Australia. (4|4) means the answer is a charade of the state's name whose two parts are hints -- homophonic puns of words or phrases that are not necessarily 4 and 4 letters. Answers are out back.
Homage To The Biliteral Society, Dave Morice
Homage To The Biliteral Society, Dave Morice
Word Ways
"Two cheers for the Biliteral Society!" I said after reading about its Dictionary of Two-Letter Words in the August 1984 issue of Word Ways. At last an official organization has recognized the importance of words that have a beginning and an end, but no middle to confuse things. In honor of the society's duplicity, I wrote a poem inspired by the diatomic nature of first-and-last-letter-only words.