Digital Commons Network^™

Ten-Square With Place Names, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Although the words in the following square only score 36 out of 50 on my crude scale of merit (because of proper names and spaces), the square as a whole deserves better, as all names are places, and from the same source.

Sighted Rhymes, Sank Same, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Sight rhymes are rhymes that look like rhymes. They have the same ending letters that you would find in rhyming words but, alas, the combinations of letters are pronounced differently. Such is the nature of the English language.

Roots And Branches: A Simplified Diagram, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

As he clearly implies, the full picture of the roots and branches of a word can be an "intertwining tangle". A particular word may be reached via several different transdeletions (or transadditions), and the resulting diagram can be confusing, with many lines crossing each other, and there being no clear indication of the structure.

Bb And The Rebusgram

Word Ways

BB is a rebus. In fact it's a rebus of rebus: "Re-B us". In this article I mainly explore the one-letter rebus, its opposite the "antirebus" and their use in higher dimensional constructions I call "rebusgrams". I close with a quiz-full of multiple-letter rebus puzzles.

Verse, Cursed: Double Dactylic Sacrilege, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

As all card-carrying recreational linguists know, the double dactyl is a serious light verse form comprising two quatrains, with each line -- except the final, rhyming lines of the quatrains -- consisting of two dactylic feet, and in which the first line must be a nonsense reduplication; the second line a proper name; and the penultimate or antepenultimate line one double dactylic word. For complete rules, origins, scholarship and numerous cerebral examples

Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Part 2), Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Part 1 of the article listed V-C patterns in 7- and 8-letter words. Part 2 repeats the exercise for 9-letter words and then analyses the 7-, 8-, and 9-letter V-C patterns.

More Palindromes, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

The following palindromes are additional to those listed in Palindromicon II. Although I have removed some candidates, those below are accompanied by sufficient information that the reader can accept or reject each as desired. My own criteria for acceptance differ from those of the Palindromicon, so this list is not precisely an addition to that work. However, I, like it, have omitted almost all initialism (CFC), also musical terms (fff), Roman numerals (MCM), chess notation (PxP), and international vehicle registrations (GBG), except for one or two. Abbreviations like Mdm, and morpheme-medial clusters like rtr are also omitted. The list is …

Kickshaws

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Lyrical Palindromes, Mark J. Russell

Word Ways

Last lash, sugar of suede

Taste yet again

A manic in a pot of rust.

Double Doubles, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

This article searches for words in which 2 pairs of double letters occur adjacently. Previous items in Word Ways have looked for words with 2 pairs of doubled letters but, almost exclusively, words in which the 2 pairs occur anywhere in relation to each other. However, scattered in these lists are examples in which the 2 pairs occur together. The History section below extracts these examples. The words are listed in alphabetical order of the doubled letters. Unreferenced words in the History section can be found in Webster's Second Edition.

Mothers And Their Vowels, Thomas L. Bernard

Word Ways

Born into the Scottish nobility in the first year of the twentieth century, Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon became the Queen Consort on the accession of her husband Prince Albert to the throne (as King George VI) in 1936. When she became a window in 1952 and her daughter became Queen Elizabeth II, she was formally known as the Queen Mother but more informally and affectionately by the general public as the "Queen Mum". Her children Elizabeth and Margaret, though grown, continued to call her "Mummy".

Bananagrams 20, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams--anagrams to drive you bananas--consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair of anagrams to be solved. One of the rhyming words will always be an anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve the anagram.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles and games contained in this issue.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

A Logological Game Of Bridge, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In a game of contract bridge, the four players are assigned the names North, East, South, and West, corresponding to their seats around a bridge table. Among the 52 playing cards, from the Spade Ace to the Club Two, which 13 are most appropriate for North to hold? Which 13 for East? For South? For West? The Spade Ace shares no letters with North, three letters with East (eas), and one letter with South (s), and two letters with West (es). So, it is logologically appropriate to assign the Spade Ace to East.

(W)Holesome Fun, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Word squares continue to constitute one of the grand research topics of recreational linguistics. The search for a universally acceptable 10-square is still one of the Holy Grails of word play. Like any substantial research topic, the idea of "word squares" suggests a further plethora of interesting related topics by modifying and relaxing its definition.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

The Heptcat Perspicuous Palindrome Producer, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Over the years, various ideas for the mechanical generation of palindromic sentences have been published in Word Ways. Of these, the simplest in concept may have been Dave Morice's Palindromic Slide Rule (August, 1995). This device separates palindromic passages into paired segments comprised of single reversal words; by shifting the positions of columns of such words with respect to one another in slide rule fashion, users can generate up to 10,000 different palindromic passages.

An Insomniac's Research Report, Frederick Crane

Word Ways

Among the many afflictions of my old age is insomnia. I do not extend periods abed when I'm conscious of being asleep, but I am more often aware of being awake.

Outtakes, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

Each group of letters below is a familiar word, phrase, name or title from which any sequence of consecutive letters of the alphabet (in order) inside it has been removed. The remaining letters are then run together. For example, NNION would represent the phrase STUDENT UNION (missing the STU, DE, and TU). The total number of letters in the original formulation appears in parentheses. How many can you reconstruct?

Faculty Consensus Leads To Creative Solutions, Kathryn Brooks

Scholarship and Professional Work – Education

The answers to many of the problems facing schools today "are in the minds of the teachers. Half our solutions are in their minds but they have to come out through open dialogue," says Gary Kruse, principal of Evans Middle School in Ottumwa, Iowa. When faced with leading a middle school that had a history of low reading scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), Mr. Kruse turned to the people who knew the students and the school climate best--the teachers...

A Longitudinal Study Of Audiovisual Speech Perception By Hearing-Impaired Children With Cochlear Implants, Tonya R. Bergeson, David B. Pisoni, Rebecca A. O. Davis

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

The present study investigated the development of audiovisual speech perception skills in children who are prelingually deaf and received cochlear implants. We analyzed results from the Pediatric Speech Intelligibility (Jerger, Lewis, Hawkins, & Jerger, 1980) test of audiovisual spoken word and sentence recognition skills obtained from a large group of young children with cochlear implants enrolled in a longitudinal study, from pre-implantation to 3 years post-implantation. The results revealed better performance under the audiovisual presentation condition compared with auditory-alone and visual-alone conditions. Performance in all three conditions improved over time following implantation. The results also revealed differential effects of early …

Hindu-Christian Dialogue: Revisiting The Tannirpalli Trinitys Original Vision, Klaus Klostermaier

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Living in India from 1961 to 1970 I intensively and extensively participated in Hindu-Christian dialogue at various levels, academic as well as existential, and I came to know personally most of the then leading figures. While Hindu friends even then kept regularly imploring their Christian counterparts to persuade their churches to desist from proselytizing, they welcomed and encouraged dialogue. During the last decades the relationship between Hindus and Christians in India has visibly deteriorated.

Dr. Richard De Smet And Sankara's Advaita, T.S. Rukmani

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

I have had the privilege of meeting Dr. Richard De Smet in Shimla at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, when we both participated in a Seminar organized by the Institute in 1989. We had opportunities of discussing Sankara's Brahman and the Christian concept of God at that time without being able to fully understand each other's position. That has been at the back of my mind all these years, and I was happy when Bradley Malkovsky asked me to write on Dr. De Smet's view of Sankara's Brahman for the Bulletin. I thus got an opportunity to revisit that …

Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Part 1), Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

In Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Word Ways 77221), Philip Cohen presented a list of words based on 125 of the possible 128 (2^7) 7-letter vowel-consonant (V-C) patterns. Somewhat belatedly, this has inspired me to undertake similar exercises for 8-letter words and 9-letter words. As Cohen's article appeared more than 25 years ago, before most of us were acquainted with Word Ways, I have also taken the liberty of repeating his 7-letter exercise, using different words wherever appropriate. Part 1 considers 7- and 8-letter words; Part 2 considers 9-letter words, and also analyses the patterns with regard to the number of words they …

Moose Laurels, Part 2: Story Spoonerisms, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

In our previous episode (Word Ways, August 2002), we examined a new crop of transposition puns accompanied by one-line definitions. Now let us turn to a related genre: the joke that contains a more detailed setup and a spoonerized punchline.

The Alphabet Cube And Beyond, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Two-letter words can be plotted as points on a two-dimensional plane. The first letter of a two-letter word is plotted against the x-axis, and the second letter is plotted against the y-axis. Along the x-axis, x=1 is equivalent to the letter A, x=2 is equivalent to the letter B, and so on, with x=26 being equivalent to the letter Z. Similarly, plot the second letter of a word on the y-axis, with y=1 equivalent to A, y=2 equivalent to B, etc. So, for example, take the two-letter word HE. The H corresponds to x=8 and the E corresponds to y=5. …

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

New Record Pangrammatic Windows, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Most readers of Word Ways are familiar with the "accidental pangram" problem, which is to find a short 'window' (block of contiguous text) in published text that, but accident rather than deliberation, contains each letter of the alphabet at least once. The record for the shortest known accidental pangram in English has stood for 95 years, as it was reported in print by A. Cyril Pearson in The Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book, published in 1907. It is from The Beth Book, a popular 1897 novel by Sarah Grand (republished as recently as 1980 by The Dial Press).

The Tebahpla, David Morice

Word Ways

Awake! As actors afterward amass,

An artful agent almost acts an ass

And asks aloud, "Are acting arts about

An artist's act? An actor's art?" Alas!