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Trandformations Of A Text (A Literary Puzzle), Paul Maxim Nov 2001

Trandformations Of A Text (A Literary Puzzle), Paul Maxim

Word Ways

This mysterious document, entitled Text B, was found among the literary remains of a famous author. It should not be confused with Minoan B, which represents an entirely different rubric.

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Back Cover Nov 2001

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Answers And Solutions Nov 2001

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Complementary Letters Nov 2001

Complementary Letters

Word Ways

The hidden DNA message in "The Oz Contradictioanry: Part 2" in the May issue, EVOLVE BY LOVE, was decoded by modeling an alphabet: anti-alphabet array after the anti-parallel structure of the double helix to dictate 26 base pairs, i.e., the complementary letter bigrams az by ex dw ev fu gt hs ir jq kp lo mn nm ol pk qj ri sh tg uf ve wd xc yb ca. Tandemly combining some of these yielded the above message, plus three other phrases nicely relevant to the adjoining polyanagram poem "Biodiversity". Can you find these? They involve two new words plus …

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Numerically Equivalent Letter Replacements, Susan Thorpe Nov 2001

Numerically Equivalent Letter Replacements, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Readers will be familiar with assigning A=1, B=2 though Z=26 to find the letter total of a word. Most of the words in this article can be found in the OED Second Edition. dfpf = A Dictionary of the Flowering Plants & Ferns, CUP 1966. Clafouti (cherry flan) can be found in recipe books.

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 3 Aug 2001

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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The Two-Year Grid, Eric Angelini Aug 2001

The Two-Year Grid, Eric Angelini

Word Ways

In the rectangular grid below, the 21 number names from 0 through 20 each appear once, along with the eight additional number-names 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100. Both the horizontal number names and the vertical ones add to 365, the number of days in a year. Furthermore, all number-names are connected, forming a single network. Can anyone construct a grid smaller than 16x17 in which all this is possible?

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Twenty Thousand Palindromic "And" S, Bill A. O'Connor Aug 2001

Twenty Thousand Palindromic "And" S, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

On page 96 of I Love Me, Vol. I, Michael Donner suggests that the ordinary possibilities of the English palindrome are so close to being exhausted that, if new work is to be produced, it may become necessary to enlist the aid of obscure abbreviations in the collection by Ralph de Sola. Word Ways editor A. Ross Eckler perhaps also has in mind the 'drome may be used up when he remarks on page 291 of the November issue that palindromes are not very important to Word Ways because they follow well-trodden paths.

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Onomatopoeia And Language Perception, Joshua Nash Aug 2001

Onomatopoeia And Language Perception, Joshua Nash

Word Ways

"Voon-voon" says the dog in Laos whilst in Romania the same creature says "ham-ham". The question we may ask here is whether dogs in different locals are saying different things or whether we humans perceive what they are saying differently? It seems common sense that a labrador in Asia and Europe will make the same noise completely independent of its surroundings. Why then does an English speaker, who is thinking "woof-woof", laugh on finding out that in Indonesia, humans perceive dogs as making the sound "gong-gong"?

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Colloquy Aug 2001

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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Two Sonnet Anagram Puzzles, Michael Keith Aug 2001

Two Sonnet Anagram Puzzles, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The poem below is stanza XXVI from the poem "Picthorn Manor" by American poet and critic Amy Lowell (1874-1925). Below it is a sonnet (in the usual form, with fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme) made from the letters in Ms. Lowell's poem. Aside form being an anagram, the sonnet has another unusual feature. Can you spot it?

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Three Anagrams Of Psalms 119, Richard Brodie Aug 2001

Three Anagrams Of Psalms 119, Richard Brodie

Word Ways

The 119th Psalm in notable for a variety of reasons.

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The Oz Contradictionary: Part 3 Aug 2001

The Oz Contradictionary: Part 3

Word Ways

"Anil" is the pen name of Dr. Charles Melton, a retired Oz (Australian) biologist who privately published in 1999 a 98-page booklet, up/dn, a dictionary and contradictionary of wordplay including anagrams, palindromes and charades. See February 2001 Word Ways for introduction.

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Presidential Name Games, Jim Puder Aug 2001

Presidential Name Games, Jim Puder

Word Ways

As familiar as we my think we are with the name of the U.S. presidents, a listing of their fully names might still provide some surprises. For example, how many of us can name, offhand, the three presidents whose first names are known to few these days? And who among us can rattle off, without consulting a reference, the middle names of Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Gerald R. Ford? In this article, we explore the roster of the full names of the U.S. presidents in search of amusement, amazement, and perhaps an occult revelation or two.

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Dual Perms, Rex Gooch Aug 2001

Dual Perms, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article responds to the challenge set by Hugo Brandt Corstius in the May 2001 issue of Word Ways. He sought pairs of words that contained the same letters (i.e., permutations of each other), which were dual in the sense that a position occupied a vowel in one was occupied by consonant in the other. This article takes vowel to mean one of A, E, I, O, or U.

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Number Trees And Networks, A. Ross Eckler, David Mroice Aug 2001

Number Trees And Networks, A. Ross Eckler, David Mroice

Word Ways

TWENTY-SEVEN has eleven letters, ELEVEN has six letters, SIX has three letters, THREE has five letters, and FIVE has four letters. No matter what number name one starts with, one always ends up at FOUR. Suppose instead one adds the number of letters in the name to the number itself to obtain a new number-name: TWENTY-SEVEN with eleven letters goes to THIRTY-EIGHT, and this sequence continues with FORTY-NINE, FIFTY-EIGHT,... ending with one of the last eight hundred number names in the thousand vigintillions.

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The Suet Alphabet Revisited, Darryl Francis Aug 2001

The Suet Alphabet Revisited, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In the August 1997 Word Ways, Nyr Indictor posted the Suet Alphabet problem. Namely, can each of the 26 letters be added in turn to SUET, and rearranged to provide a real word? Examples were given for 25 of the letters, but the rearrangement of SUET and Z was problematical.

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Planet Packing Revisited, Dana Richards Aug 2001

Planet Packing Revisited, Dana Richards

Word Ways

Ross Eckler discusses a problem in his article "Planet Packing" in the May 2001 Word Ways: given a list of words, such as the names of the planets, how efficiently can they be packed into a single string of characters so that each word on the list can be read off left to right (but not necessarily contiguously)? He hypothesizes "there is no guarantee that any algorithm will end up with a minimum string." Since the design and analysis of algorithms has been my area of research for some 25 years, this caught my attention. Informally, an algorithm is a …

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Two Dual Cryptograms, Candice Hirst Aug 2001

Two Dual Cryptograms, Candice Hirst

Word Ways

This was prompted by Doug McIlroy's "Dual Cryptograms" (Word Ways, August 1997). A dual cryptogram is two texts, each of which results from enciphering the other using a substitution cipher. This means that occurrences of the same letter in the first text are replaced by occurrences of the same letter in the second; different letters in the first are replaced by different letters in the second. No letter may stay as itself. Spaces are preserved; punctuation may be added or removed at will, and the distinction between lower and upper case is ignored. Although Doug treated hyphens like spaces, I …

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Day And Color Packing, Darryl Francis Aug 2001

Day And Color Packing, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Ross Eckler explored planet packing in the May 2001 issue, attempting to generate an algorithm to create a string of letters from which the names of the planets could be read sequentially. Ross suggested readers might like to explore possible strings for other groups of names.

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Kickshaws, Susan Thorpe Aug 2001

Kickshaws, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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"Ironing The Bugs Out": Mixed Metaphors, Don Hauptman Aug 2001

"Ironing The Bugs Out": Mixed Metaphors, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

The mixed metaphor has long been vilified by language lovers. After all, a metaphor per se is often a stretch. The attempt to combine two or more vastly dissimilar figures of speech usually result in a jarring incongruity and an absurd image. Such clashes are often amusing, although the humor is strictly unintentional.

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Back Cover Aug 2001

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Word Squares? No, Oblongs!, Christopher Mcmanus Aug 2001

Word Squares? No, Oblongs!, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

The Holy Grail of word grids is the elusive ten-square. Squares as a class are the overwhelming focus of word grid study. But squares are only a special case of the generalized word grid universe.

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Bananagrams 14, Edmund Conti Aug 2001

Bananagrams 14, 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 can be found in Answers and Solutions are the end of this issue.

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Middle Names, William Webster Aug 2001

Middle Names, William Webster

Word Ways

For the purpose of this article, a middle name is a given name that can be centered in a dictionary word-the longer, the better. Two-letter names such as ED, AL, and JO can always be embedded (feEDer, deALer, banJOist), and I do not consider them further. Below is a type collection of nearly one hundred middle names of three or more letters; no doubt readers can add more. Six-letter names are hard to embed, and there is only one-seven-letter example. Often, one encounters agonizing near-misses like sCARLet, ePAULet and mAGNESia. I am indebted to the editor for adding a number …

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Answers And Solutions Aug 2001

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Three New Transdeletion Pyramids, Richard Sabey Aug 2001

Three New Transdeletion Pyramids, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

In "Two New Transdeletion Pyramids" in the May 1988 Word Ways, the editor gives two 17-letter transdeletion pyramids found by Kyle Corbin, the first of which consists of words from either Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language. I believe that a word found in Webster's Third is better than one found in Webster's Second but not the Third, because (whatever the faults of the Third or the merits of the Second), the Third superseded the Second.Accordingly, I pass on three 17-letter transdeletion pyramids consisting entirely of words in the Third or inflections implied by the Third, assuming that …

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The Dictionary Of Wordplay, Richard Lederer May 2001

The Dictionary Of Wordplay, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

I wouldn't be a rich letterer if I didn't tell you that the acronimble Peter Pangram who put together this dictionary is an alphabet male, paronamazing pun gent, alliterary anagrammarian, morpheme addict, onomatopetic onomasticator, his Lexcellency who lives in a Camel lot of palindromedaries, Uncle Rebus, and Charader of the Lost Art.

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Stubborn Rhymes, Ove Michaelsen May 2001

Stubborn Rhymes, Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

It is said that there is no word in English that rhymes with MONTH, but GRUNTH, an alternate spelling of granth, rhymes perfectly is one of its pronunciations. Other rhymes for that word are millionth, billionth, trillionth and zillionth.

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