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The Tell-Tale Typewriter, Enoch Haga Nov 1993

The Tell-Tale Typewriter, Enoch Haga

Word Ways

In the Oakland Tribune of April 2, 1971, there appeared "Most Common Typo" in the Ann Landers column, a tale of suspected typewriter crime. It seems that a frantic father had written to Ann about a letter that his wife, in her sixth year of analysis, had received from her 18-year-old daughter, who was away at college.

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Pig Lawns And Diaper Spas, Christopher Mcmanus Nov 1993

Pig Lawns And Diaper Spas, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Surprise is a key ingredient of wordplay's charm. Many forms of wordplay amuse us by rearranging one word's letters into two or more unrelated, unexpected words. One basic class of letter rearrangements is Word interlocks. Interlocks are the rearrangements that split a word but preserve the original letter-ordering in the derived words. The title of this article includes two amusing interlocks: laPwInGs and DIsAPpEaRs.

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Significantly-Different Word Squares, Leonard Gordon Nov 1993

Significantly-Different Word Squares, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In a May 1993 Word Ways article, Donald Knuth says that the reason his computer found so many 5x5x5 word cubes is that so many five-letter words can be tweaked" into others. Each tweak or combination of tweaks can produce a new cube, only slightly different from the old one.

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Quancrete Poetry, Charles Suhor Nov 1993

Quancrete Poetry, Charles Suhor

Word Ways

In t he February 1993 Word Ways, David Morice wrote about crossnumber forms, a rule-governed arrangement of grids composed of numbers that are spelled out. the goal in crossnumber forms is to discover nontrivial patterns of horizontal and vertical interconnectedness, as in two of Morice's simple but elegant examples:

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Ten-Square Hunters, Unite!, Ted Clarke Nov 1993

Ten-Square Hunters, Unite!, Ted Clarke

Word Ways

According to the wordsquare pundits, it would appear that they give themselves Buckleys of creating a generally-acceptable tensquare. Nevertheless, although there is widespread agreement among them that the time required to exhaust all possibilities could well be extra-universal, many are devoting Sisyphean time and effort to the compilation of ever-lengthening lists of ten-letter words.

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Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair, Howard Richler Nov 1993

Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair, Howard Richler

Word Ways

One of the sophomoric jokes making the rounds in the early Sixties explains the difference between a good girl and a nice girl as follows: the good girl goes to a party, goes home, and goes to bed; the nice girl goes to bed, then goes home.

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Dialect Drinking, Jeff Grant Nov 1993

Dialect Drinking, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Just about everyone enjoys a tipple from time to time, some more than others. The language associated with drinking and drinkers is the most colorful of all activities. Anybody who has marveled at the record of 2231 ways to say "drunk" in the section "Soused Synonyms" in Paul Dickson's "Words" (Delacorte Press, 1982) appreciates the variety and humour that flows from the tosspot's tipsified tongue.

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Word-Square Support: Part 2, A. Ross Eckler Nov 1993

Word-Square Support: Part 2, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

This is the second of two articles examining the statistical characteristics of the support for a word square (the sample size needed to produce, on the average, a single word square). In the preceding article, published in the August 1993 Word Ways, a method was developed for calculating the support from small sample sizes - ones large enough to typically produce only a few squares, rather than the thousands of millions found by Chris Long.

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Miscommunication Code Words, Chris Cole Nov 1993

Miscommunication Code Words, Chris Cole

Word Ways

Many letters have sound-alike names, for example "b" and "p": radio operators use communication code words such as BRAVO and PETER to avoid confusing these letters. A committee of logologists got together to try to submit a more interesting list of code words, drawing only on words from Webster's Third. Here is the list they produced (B, N, R, and S need better examples):

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Basque Palindromes, Dan Tilque Nov 1993

Basque Palindromes, Dan Tilque

Word Ways

Recently, I've been looking through foreign language dictionaries in search of additions to Jeff Grant's "The Palindromicon" (Word Ways Monograph Series 3). I've found an unusual set of them in the Basque-English Dictionary by Gorky Aulestin which I would like to share with World Ways readers.

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Kickshaws, David Morice Nov 1993

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Baby Talk, Kay Haugaard Nov 1993

Baby Talk, Kay Haugaard

Word Ways

"Here, - let Daddy help Mikie down from the step. He might hurt himself if he jumped."

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Answers And Solutions Nov 1993

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Back Cover Nov 1993

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Of Vowels And Things, John Foster Aug 1993

Of Vowels And Things, John Foster

Word Ways

Some years ago I was in hospital for an operation and every morning at some point a bright young nurse came in to ask if my vowels had moved yet. The reason for this strange request was not immediately obvious, for the answers "yes," "no," "purple," "broccoli," "42" and "Ford Prefect" all seemed to elicit the same noncommittal response. But I'm not stupid, I knew what they were after. If my vowels were to move far enough to actually transpose then my surname would become FESTOR, obviously undesirable in one recovering from surgery. You can be very sure I maintained …

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Some New Discoveries, Darryl Francis Aug 1993

Some New Discoveries, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

This brief article presents three words which have never before had the logological spotlight turned on them. It seems surprising that these words have lain unnoticed for so long. What other treasures are there still waiting to be discovered?

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Colloquy Aug 1993

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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Why Can't Doctors Spell?, Christopher Mcmanus Aug 1993

Why Can't Doctors Spell?, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

The illegibility of doctors' handwriting has spawned innumerable jokes. Jottings that seem illegible and unintelligible may actually be technical terms that mimic commoner words. A cursory scan of Stedman's Medical Dictionary (1976) uncovered scores of seemingly-misspelled words. An abridged collection of these is given below, where each scientific term is followed by a brief definition, with its common look-alike in parentheses.

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A Smaller Presidential Rectangle, Lee Sallows Aug 1993

A Smaller Presidential Rectangle, Lee Sallows

Word Ways

After admiring Darryl Francis's new presidential rectangle in Word Ways for May 1993, I began wondering if his result could be improved upon. The temptation to have a try finally proved irresistable. The result has rewarded efforts. Francis captures the names of all 37 US presidents within an area of 17x29 = 418, a reduction of 75 square units!

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Kickshaws, David Morice Aug 1993

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Tucson Word Squares, Leonard Gordon Aug 1993

Tucson Word Squares, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

Here is a little game I played, involving the construction of a fake 8x8 word squares. From a set of 37,000 eight-letter words, extract the commonest four-letter beginnings and four-letter endings. The commonest beginnings were over 251, fore 123, back 65, hand 60, outs 59, down 52, wood 52 and foot 51. The 89 commonest beginnings (down to the cent, rock, rose, book, home, distresi and others with 24 occurrences) yielded seven 4x4 squares; in fact, the first square was produced from the 30 commonest beginnings, and the second square from the 44 commonest.

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Yugoslavian Transadditions, Darryl Francis Aug 1993

Yugoslavian Transadditions, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

With Yugoslavia so much in the news these days, I have put together a list of Yugoslavia-related transposals and transadditions, plus a few substitute-letter transpositions, Can Word Ways readers expand on my list?

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Answers And Solutions Aug 1993

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Word Worms, A. Ross Eckler Aug 1993

Word Worms, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In a 3-by-3-by-3 lattice there are 27 cubes of equal size - a central cube surrounded by 26 neighbors. Assign the 26 letters of the alphabet to these cubes according to the following diagram.

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 26 Issue 3 Aug 1993

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 26 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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The Mallarme Cryptopuzzles, Paul Maxim Aug 1993

The Mallarme Cryptopuzzles, Paul Maxim

Word Ways

The French poet and essayist Stephane Mallarme (1842-1989) had a varied career as a writer and pedagogue. Employed as a teacher of English in the French school system, he produced, in addition to his literary output, a variety of didactic works such as "The Erglish Words," "The English Themes," "The Ancient Gods." etc.. which may have been used to complement his classroom activities.

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Wordnim And Grundyword, Jeremiah Farrell Aug 1993

Wordnim And Grundyword, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

An interesting two-person game begins by choosing any set of words - say, for example, O, HIP, LLAMA, and PIASTER. Players alternately remove one or more letters from exactly one of the four words (all the letters in a word can be removed). Both the deleted letters and those remaining in the player's chosen word must be transposable into words themselves. The game ends when a player cannot make a legal move; the other player is the winner.

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Further Fabled Phrases, Peter Newby Aug 1993

Further Fabled Phrases, Peter Newby

Word Ways

Abstract unavailable.

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The Vowelindrome, Stephen Chism Aug 1993

The Vowelindrome, Stephen Chism

Word Ways

I have coined a new term in order to point out a phenomenon in the English language: the vowelindrome. A vowelindrome is a series of palindromes which result from the placement of a single letter immediately before and after each of the five vowels. After 26 trials and 24 errors, I have determined that there are only two vowelindromes, corresponding to the letters P and T.

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Substitute-Letter Isogram Networks, Leonard Gordon Aug 1993

Substitute-Letter Isogram Networks, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In past Word Ways issues, I have explored (Carrollian) word networks (Feb, May, Aug 1989), insertion-deletion networks (Aug 1990) and directed word chain networks (Aug, Nov 1991); I now study substitute-letter transposition (SLT) networks.

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