Digital Commons Network^™

There, Denis Borris

Word Ways

I can't believe it there isn't there. I'm at the Ottawa Public Library--Rideau Street Branch. Without too much trouble, I just got in the "general"subject" module of the public-use computer, entered TH, hit the return key. Nothing on"there": "therapy" is followed by "thesis".

Eth Rat Coed Face, William Webster

Word Ways

"Lil ware het lickers," Apt dolt Enters, hewn eh acme fro het married.

"Overacts hotting, tub on rani--hared no eth aroid juts won."

"Si het whereat porter kayo?"

"Strut em!" saw Nereis prostie,

"Who arf si het Tar Code Face?"

"Net limes."

Drawn Inward And Other Poems: Part 2, Mike Mcguire

Word Ways

Seasons

Leaves fall.

Approaching winter with regret,

we wonder no less.

Together are beauty and truth,

then truth and beauty

are together less.

No wonder we regret.

With winter approaching,

fall leaves.

One Alphabet Scrabble, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

You're playing solitaire Scrabble, where the bag of tiles has just one of each letter and no blanks. The game is open, i.e. you choose which letters to draw when. After all your plays, deduct the values of the unplayed tiles. How much can you score?

The Origin Of The -Gry Problem, Chris Cole

Word Ways

On page 96 of my book Wordplay (Sterling Publishing Company, 1999) I state that the "-gry" puzzle originated on the Bob Grant talk show on WMCA-AM in New York City and was.

Bananagrams 12, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams--anagrams to drive you bananas--consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair or 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 at the end of the issue.

Theme And Variations, John E. Connett

Word Ways

John Connett is one of the most prolific composers of short palindromic phrases. These often come in related families, as shown most spectacularly in "Ed's Palindromic Trickery" in the May 2000 Word Ways. Here are a number of further examples.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

A Calculated Display, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The numbers which appear on the LCD of a calculator are made of a series of straight-line segments. For the purpose of the current exercise, I ignored (a) the gap junctions between the straight-line segments and (b) the fact that the numbers are displayed at an angle. The game is to turn the ten numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 on the calculator display into words. To do this, I started with a three-by-five grid of 15 cells, the smallest possible grid for the exercise. When drawn on the grid, each number occupies specific …

Pi Words, Howard Bergerson, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The number pi (= 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288...) is fundamental to the very fabric of the universe, so it's not surprising to encounter it in a number of logological contexts. In this article we explore families of words having a connection with the value of pi. Unless noted, all words are in Webster's Third Unabridged.

Residual Heterograms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A heterogram is a word with no repeated letters. Residual heterograms are made by discarding letter repeats in words and then rearranging the remaining letters to form a word. Words with repeated letters can be divided into.

Compassionate Conservative, Mike Morton

Word Ways

I keep hearing this "compassionate term". Not being quite sure what it means, I figure there's one sure way to find the deeper meaning.

Fortune Cookie Fortunes, Dave Morice

Word Ways

I've written fortune cookie fortunes for a long time, but I haven't sold any of them. I do it just in case I run across a fortune cookie publisher who needs a few gems of wisdom for that thin piece of paper that is to a fortune cookie what the cream filling is to a Hostess Cupcake. Here are some of my fortune cookie fortunes--all guaranteed true.

Panalphabetic Windows In Literature, Michael Keith

Word Ways

The pangrammatic window in running text has been extensively studied, but its cousin in panalphabetic window (containing each letter of the alphabet at least once, and in alphabetical order) has been somewhat neglected. In this note I explore accidental panalphabetic windows in existing works of literature. Specifically, the 1500 works of the Project Gutenberg CD-ROMs were examined by a computer program to determine the smallest window in each, after which some of the more remarkable ones were culled for presentation here.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

An Automatic Palindrome Generator, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

In 1984 Dan Hoey, a US naval mathematician, wrote a computer which he used to create a 540-word expansion of Leigh Mercer's "Panama" palindrome (PD). It began "A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac..." and ended "...a calmus, a diaryman, a bater, a canal Panama." (For the full PD, plus additional information, see http://www2.vo.lu/homepages/phahn/anagrams/panama/htm.)

Fractured English Defractured, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

In the July 22, 1990 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Bill Bryson guest-wrote the "On Language" column, substituting for the vacationing William Safire. Titled "A Taste for Scrambled English," the column focuses on the garbling of American English around the world.

Super-Ideal Seven-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the case of 7-letter words, almost one-third are heterograms, the fraction of isolanos decreases to about a quarter, and for the first time we have some onalosis (words in which each letter can be changed independently to make another word). Moreover, we only have to find eight related words for each ladder. These facts mean that the number of ladders starting and ending with heterograms with every letter differing between the two words, increase over a thousandfold to nearly 100,00, and more common words appear.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Six-Letter Connoisseur's Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

By the time we reach six-letter words, conditions for superior ladders are much improved: nearly one-half of six-letter words are heterograms (all letters are different), the fraction of isolanos (words which have no neighbours) decreases to less than one-tenth, there is a reasonable number of onalosis (words which have neighbours for each letter change), and each word has on average almost six neighbours (one for each letter). In this article, we therefore only consider ladders in which the terminal words are heterograms, with corresponding letters different, and with letters replaced in order. Even so, there are about fifty thousand of …

Alphabetically Ordered Prose, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

Absolutely accurate alphabetical arrangement as basic constraint determines eligibility. Elsewhere, evidently, examples exist. Here, however, I implicitly include inflated initial iteration. Judiciously, keep lengthy lists meaningful. Mind, moreover, my not ordaining panalphabetism, pangrams quite readily require some texts to use (usually) utterly vapid verbiage, "xylophone", "your", "zippers".

Knotted Word Worms, Michael Keith

Word Ways

In an article in the August 1993 Word Ways, Ross Eckler introduced the concept of a word worm, an object defined on the three-dimensional lattice of integer-valued points. Each point on this lattice has 26 neighbors which can be reached by a single orthogonal or diagonal step. These 26 stepping directions are identified with the 26 letters of the alphabet as shown in Figure 1. This positive X direction is defined by the N-step, the positive Y direction, by the K-step, and the positive Z direction, by the E step.

Clock Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

To understand my episode of horological horror, various things need to be explained. I began by assigning a number of minutes to each letter of the alphabet so that A occupies one minute, B two minutes, C three minutes through Z 26 minutes. The time occupied by a word is therefore equal to the sum of the minutes occupied b y each of its letters. Thus the word TIME occupies a period of 47 = 20 + 9 + 13 + 5 minutes.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Selecting International Modes Of Entry And Expansion, Gregory E. Osland, Charles R. Taylor, Shaoming Zou

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Selecting a mode for entering or expanding in a foreign market is a crucial strategic decision for an international firm. This article identifies and compares the most influential factors that affect the international modes of entry and expansion decisions of US and Japanese firms. Using mail surveys, this is one of the first studies on this subject to collect data from top executives in both Japan and the USA. Findings reveal that the Japanese are particularly sensitive to external risk and other target market factors. For Americans, company factors, such as international experience, appear to be most important when selecting …

Luis Goytisolo Beyond "Antagonía": His Search For Agency In Democratic Spain, Terri Carney

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Since his monumentally successful tetralogy, Antagonía, Luis Goytisolo has adapted his literary style to survive the changes in both the publishing world and the greater cultural context of post-Franco Spain. Indeed, his post-Antagonía novels can be divided into two phases: the structurally complex novels of the 1980s, and the more readable novels of the 1990s. Although these two groups of novels differ stylistically, they both form part of Goytisolo's ongoing critique of Western man's investment in subjectivity as either a controlling, self-governed force or a controlled subject, both of which occlude a viable notion of human agency. My study …

Escaping The Prison Of Singularity, Marshall W. Gregory

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Few human activities investigate the poverty or richness of human life or describe the mechanisms of ethical formation as fully and particularly as narratives do. In the development of our intellectual views and ethical stances, we cannot do without the guidance and examples of first-hand friends, acquaintances, and loved ones, but neither can we do without the second-hand guidance and examples of narrative friends and loved ones, for these latter supplement our need for sociability and help us fill out the education about the ways and means of being human that we receive from first-hand acquaintances. It would be wise …

How Many Anagrams Are There?, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This short article was prompted by the formula for Prob(N) in Michael Keith's "What are the odds that X is an anagram of Y?" in Word Ways, August 2000. It seemed to me that multiplying the values of that function by the square of the number of words of a given length might be expected to give an estimate of the number of words of a given length that are permutations of another word.

Near-Ideal Eight-Letter Word Ladders, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

As we move from 9- to 8-letter words, the number of neighbours per word increases by one-third, so the number of ideal ladders (those which change every letter in the minimum number of steps) jumps from about 50 to a few thousand. The percentage of heterograms doubles to a significant 20 per cent, so that the number of ladders between heterograms (with just one unchanged letter in the eight steps) explodes to over six thousand. Combining these facts, for the first time we find ideal ladders between heterograms, thus fulfilling the first three conditions for the elusive Connoisseur's Ladder. The …