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Look Back!, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Over the years, Word Ways has displayed a varied logological corpus. In this column I revisit forgotten ideas, connect seemingly-disparate concepts, and suggest further investigations.

Colloquy

Word Ways

Rollin Stearns' fine article on clerihews in this issue reintroduces the term to new readers. Rollin tried his hand at limericks too, submitting this effort:

A puzzler ferociously feral,
Whose muzzle puts wizards in peril
Roared jeremiads
At druids and dryads
While guzzling his beer by the barrel.

Clerihews: A Personal History, Rollin Stearns

Word Ways

It was many years ago that I first became acquainted with a form of light verse called a clerihew. At the time I was reading some poetry by W. H. Auden. Most of Auden's poetry was serious, but some of it was light, and I especially liked the following:

James Watt
Was the hard-boiled kind of Scot
He thought any dream
Sheer waste of steam.

Infatuation, Win Emmons

Word Ways

A poem.

A Puzzler, Harold Jacobs

Word Ways

Harold submits this fine poser. Can you fill in the blanks with no hints? The answer will run on our website in a few weeks.

Hexagons And Their Edges, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In Edge Words (WW98274), Upward Edge Words (WW2006235) and Generic Edges (WW2007235), the letters of a word are arranged, in the order in which they occur in the word (1, 2, 3 ...), to make a range of forms - triangles, pentagons and rhombuses (see below respectively).

The Resilience Of The Lambs, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

A century and three quarters after "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was published, residents of Sterling, Massachusetts and Newport, New Hampshire are still arguing over the ownership of this famous little ditty about the faithful lamb and unwelcoming schoolteacher. According to Sterling, the Mary of the poem was a girl named Mary Sawyer, born there in 1806. One day in 1815 her devoted lamb followed her to school and up the classroom aisle when she was asked to recite a lesson. The teacher, alas, turned the lamb out.

Using A Resiliency Perspective To Inform Bilingual Teachers’ Classroom Inquiry, Brooke Kandel-Cisco, Yolanda Padrón

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

Recent research has established the importance of teacher quality in the academic success or failure of students (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Sanders, Wright, & Horn, 2004) and policy initiatives, such as NCLB, have propelled the issue of teacher quality to the forefront of educational reform in the U.S. While No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been successful in establishing minimum teacher quality standards for general educators, the act has failed to highlight the importance of quality for teachers of second language learners (Nieto. 2003).

Teacher quality is especially impo1tant for second language learners. both because of the pedagogic and Iinguistic complexities inherent …

Improving Reading Comprehension In Dual Language Programs, Susana E. Franco-Fuenmayor, Brooke Kandel-Cisco, Yolanda Padrón

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

The low achievement levels and high dropout rates of English Language Learners (ELLs) continue to be a great challenge for educators. One area that can provide us with useful information on how to improve the education of ELLs is dual language programs. Research in this area indicates that native language development is important for academic success. The present study examined the cognitive reading strategies of students enrolled in a dual language program. The results indicate that both language groups of students were using successful cognitive reading strategies to comprehend text. The study also describes how the questionnaire used in the …

Capitalizing On Affect: Viagra (In)Action, Kristin A. Swenson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Recent cultural criticisms of Viagra’s advertisements and promotional materials have argued that rhetorical constructions of Viagra users reestablish a hegemonic masculinity premised on heterosexual standards of traditional gender norms (Baglia, 2005; Bordo, 2000; Loe, 2004). Cultural critics have also noted that Viagra’s promotional materials allow “for alternative readings by potential users who do not fall into the category of the ‘traditional/ideal’ Viagra user” including women and homosexual men (Mamo & Fishman, 2001, p. 14). What most criticisms fail to take into account is that Viagra, like other lifestyle drugs, does not only reestablish cultural constructs of the contemporary gendered body …

Bailey's Hexameters, Jeremiah Farrell, Al Shapiro

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Nat. Bailey was the most important English lexicographer before Samuel Johnson. Our interest in this essay is to report on some of the 1730 dictionary's entries for the "Entertainmen of the Curious".

The Asteroid Puzzle And Games, Jeremiah Farrell, Karen Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Each of our two-person games is a word version variation from the tic-tac-toe or noughts and crosses family. It is well known that classic tic-tac-toe is a draw when expertly played. It is also clear that not all of its plays are equal- a strong move for the first player is to initially take the powerul center square. ASTEROID and ASTEROID II, on the other hand, are both completely symmetric (in the sense that all letters are used equally) and each have rather suble forced wins for either the first or second player.

Cube Mentalism, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our tour of multidimensional cubes begins with the marking of the eight comers of a 3-cube with the eight words HOT, POT, POD, HOD, HAD, HAT, PAT, and PAD. The figure below shows how these eight inherit the labels of the HOT-PAD).die where the letter H is opposite P, the letter O is opposite T and the letter T is opposite the letter D...

The First Gathering, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The following is a photocopy of a letter I sent to my good friend James P. Fink shortly after the first Gathering in 1993. It is not reqritten or edited in any way in hopes of conveying to you some sense of my awe at how very special this event really way. My son David, then a student in Boston, was also privileged to be invited by Tom Rodgers and David and I still feel overwhelmed by the experience.

There are so many memories- and so many friends. After you have read the letter, I will remark on some of …

The Stenographic Affine Plane, Oscar Thumpbindle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This square, composed of familiar words, is semimagic because any row or column (the rook sweeps) anagrams into STENOGRAPHIC. "Semi" means the diagonals don't. However, there are four very special diagonals; those that have words with one of the four vowels of STENOGRAPHIC in common. These four bishop sweeps will be important later. Keeping with the chess piece theme, the reader will take notice of the knight 4-tours using the consonants P, H, Rand C. For example one of these is the P-tour SAP, PEG, PIN and TOP. Another set of knight tours traces the letters S, T, G and …

Innocent Initiations: Female Agency In Eroticized Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Bawdy folktales have generated controversy and scholarship for centuries, and their literary, sexually explicit descendants, eroticized fairy tales, are also deserving of attention. Marketed in short story collections as erotica, eroticized fairy tales use fairy-tale characters, plots, and themes as the setting for sexual adventures. Some of these tales focus on a naïve heroine’s initiation into sexual pleasure without her knowing precisely what is going on. I have termed these “innocent initiation” tales. Their use of traditional fairy-tale motifs contributes to discourse about female sexuality, agency, and objectification.

Redeeming Indian ‘Christian’ Womanhood?: Missionaries, Dalits, And Agency In Colonial India, Chad M. Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This study of dalit Christians in colonial North India suggests that women who converted to Christianity in the region often experienced a contraction of the range of their activities. Bauman analyzes this counterintuitive result of missionary work and then draws on the work of Saba Mahmood and others to interrogate the predilection of feminist historians for agents, rabble-rousers, and gender troublemakers. The article concludes not only that this predilection represents a mild form of egocentrism but also that it prevents historians from adequately analyzing the complexity of factors that motivate and influence human behavior.

Postcolonial Anxiety And Anti-Conversion Sentiment In The Report Of The Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee, Chad M. Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Conversion to Christianity is one of the most politically charged issues in contemporary India and has recently been very much in the news.1 For example, in 2006, on the fiftieth anniversary of B. R. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism2 hundreds of dalits gathered to convert, some to Buddhism and others to Christianity, rejecting Hinduism, a religion they claim oppresses and demeans them. In attacks on Christians in Orissa at the end of 2007 (and associated reprisals), dozens of churches, homes, and businesses were destroyed, hundreds of people were injured, and thousands were displaced.

Do We Teach Disciplines Or Do We Teach Students?—What Difference Does It Make?, Marshall W. Gregory

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The single most difficult notion for graduate students and new professors to grasp about teaching--and, indeed, many experienced teachers never grasp this point either--is that successful teaching to undergraduates has little to do with the degree of one's mastery of disciplinary knowledge.

Humanities Education Then, Now And Why, Marshall W. Gregory

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The problem of educational metaphors in the humanities is that the metaphors driving the humanities since the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance-metaphors that educators still rely on today-no longer work in the twenty-first century.

History And Fiction In The Acts Of Thomas: The State Of The Question, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The Acts of Thomas has not yet received as much attention as the Gospel associated with the same individual, and this is understandable. Current students of this early Christian work, however, are in danger of missing out on the discussions and differing perspectives long offered by scholars of the Indian church and Indian history on this work. The current study suggests that, while the Acts of Thomas is almost certainly a work of novelistic fiction, this should not lead us to ignore the instances of confirmable historical information embedded therein, as in many other works of historical fiction. The Acts …

Effects Of Early Musical Experience On Auditory Sequence Memory, Adam T. Tierney, Tonya R. Bergeson, David B. Pisoni

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

The present study investigated a possible link between musical training and immediate memory span by testing experienced musicians and three groups of musically inexperienced subjects (gymnasts, Psychology 101 students, and video game players) on sequence memory and word familiarity tasks. By including skilled gymnasts who began studying their craft by age six, video game players, and Psychology 101 students as comparison groups, we attempted to control for some of the ways skilled musicians may differ from participants drawn from the general population in terms of gross motor skills and intensive experience in a highly skilled domain from an early age. …

Missionary Views Of Hinduism, Catherine Cornille

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Since the beginning of the modern missionary movement, Christian missionary views of Hinduism have changed significantly, partly as a result of linguistic developments (to which some missionaries contributed in important ways) and partly as a result of theological shifts (themselves also at times inspired by missionary insights and experiences). The views of an eighteenth century Christian missionary thus differ radically from those of missionaries able to profit from the translation efforts of nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship, and the views of a contemporary Roman Catholic missionary may bear little resemblance to that of an Evangelical Protestant.

Comparative Theology, Comparative Religion, And Hindu-Christian Studies: Ethnography As Method, Kristin Bloomer

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Concerns that likely inspired today's panel can be traced textually to the beginnings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and to the earliest writings of what we now call Hinduism. In the field of Hindu-Christian studies, these concerns suggest ethnographic approaches that are not in themselves new, but which borrow in potentially new ways from the methodological tool-boxes of anthropology, theology and the history of religions.

Being Catholic The Tamil Way: Assimilation And Differentiation, Selva J. Raj

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

The ritual life of Tamil Catholics in south India defies tidy, conventional categories like assimilation, differentiation, and othering, since the complex negotiations characteristic of this lived tradition often involve both assimilation and differentiation. This dynamic reflects/reveals their hybrid and liminal cultural and religious condition where boundaries are not fixed or absolute, but constantly fluid, permeable, and negotiable. While this pattern is manifest almost in all spheres of Tamil Catholic life and practice, in this paper I focus on how lay Catholics configure and maintain their "tamilness" in the realms of devotional music, caste discourse, and public devotional rituals with relevant …

Crossword

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle

Self-Expressive Number Names, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

If one sets A=1, B=2, ... Z=26, it is well-known that no number-name is self expressive (15+14+5 does not add to ONE, 20+23+15 to TWO, etc.). However, there are other ways to arithmetically combine numbers.

Mary's Lamb, Win Emmons

Word Ways

A poem.

Colloquy

Word Ways

In May of 2007 the United States Postal Service did away with all the cheaper rates for foreign mail. All mail now must go at air mail rates, sometimes as much as nearly $10 per issue. In addition certain United States special rates have been abolished. Word Ways must now be delivered by first class mail to domestic subscribers and by air mail on a sliding scale to foreign readers. Please check our new rates on the inside front cover. These rates are designed so that Word Ways can break even in its production - we do not aspire to …

Scrabble Algebra, David Morice

Word Ways

In the Aug 1991 Kickshaws, I noted that TWELVE is the only self-referential number in Scrabble. That is, the Scrabble values of the six letters add up to the number itself: 1 + 4 + 1 + 1 + 4 +1 = 12. In the Nov 1991 Kickshaws, Jeff Grant suggested spelling the numbers on a Scrabble board, which has double and triple letter and word squares, and using that method he found that the following are self-referential.