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Palindromic Construction, Howard Richler

Word Ways

LIVE NOT ON EVIL

ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA

DEGAS, ARE WE NOT DRAWN ONWARD, WE FREER FEW, DRAWN

ONWARD TO NEW ERAS AGED?

Alphamagic Squares, Lee Sallows

Word Ways

In the November 1990 Kickshaws, Dave Morice presented some remarkable word sets due to Michael Sussna. As Ross Eckler was kind enough to point out, the latter are closely related to alphamagic squares, a topic I introduced in a two-part article that appeared in 1986 in Abacus, a computer quarterly published by Springer-Verlag(1). Alas, Abacus was discontinued in 1988 after a brief five-year run.

Naughty Words In British Placenames, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The source material of this article has been collected fairly casually over a number of years, with a few gaps filled recently by searching gazetters of British placenames. At first blush, the material might seem more suitable for Dr. Reinhold Aman's Maledita, the International Journal of Verbal Aggression. However, his journal is more concerned with the employment of words for maldictive purposes, whereas Word Ways emphasizes the wordplay aspect of language - in this instance, the nesting of potentially-embarrassing words in the normal-appearing placenames.

You Will Oscar, You Will, Bert N. Weepy

Word Ways

The November 1990 Word Ways carried an article entitled "The Shaming of the True" by one Peter Newby - whoever he may be. His premise, supported by a series of non-anagrams, was to the effect that the film "Kiss Me Kate" was written by the actor whom he misspelt as James 'Stuart'. This is nonsense.

Onomatopoeia: Things That Go Bump, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

According to the Ninth Collegiate, onomatopoeia is the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it. There are more than one hundred onomatopoeic words in the Collegiate that exhibit this characteristic, identifiable by the use of the word NOISE or SOUND in the definition.

Yawn On Way?, Bennett Saferstein

Word Ways

Nail a tiny lever on a fumed, well-let sewer. An Amtrak car is evil, one-post angel. A snail likes a can. Is Atlas not Roman? Is Don Regan a mega-star? A stage manager nods. In a Morton Salt, as in a case Kilian's Ale, gnats open olives. I rack art, man. Are we still (lewd emu fan or Evelyn) Italian?

Unfed Rocks And Scaly Things, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Many types of word puzzles depend on manipulating the letters of a particular word or phrase. Anagrams and charades preserve the letter-set of the initial word set; beheadments and word ladders change a letter at a time. Beheadments, charades and word ladders preserve the order of letters in the given word; anagrams alter it.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles in this issue.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Drat Saddam, A Mad Dastard

Word Ways

Saddam Hussein, much in the news recently, is the subject of the following palindromes of Ben Saferstein and Jeff Grant (note the latter uses all the letters of the alphabet).

A Word String Network, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Logologists have been aware of word strings -- overlapping lists of words such as sat, ate, tea, ear, are -- since at least the time of the great English puzzle-constructor Henry Ernest Dudeney. However, no one seems to have realized that word strings can be diagrammed in a network, much as has been done for word ladders (see, for example, the May and August 1973 issue of Word Ways, or Chapter 4 of my book "Word Recreations," published by Dover in 1979).

Four-Letter Word Network Update, Leonard J. Gordon

Word Ways

A word network is a set of words of a given length in which any two words differing by only one letter in a single position (such as aunt and runt, or hire and hare) are connected by a line. Using three lines, one can trace out a path leading from any word in a network to any other word in the same network. THe terminal words, together with the intermediate words in the path, form a word ladder, well-known since the days of Lewis Caroll. This article updates a number of recent articles in Word Ways describing the …

Reflective Word Networks, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In the February 1991 Kickshaws, Dave Morice introduced the concept of the palindrome ladder, one which starts with a word and travels to its reversal changing one letter at a time passing through a palindrome at its central rung.

Consistent Sesquipedalianism Update, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The quality of a long word having t he same first and last letter is described by Dmitri Borgmann as 'consistent sesquipedalianism'. In "Language on Vacation" Dmitri displays a list of 26 words, each beginning and ending with the same letter, giving an example for every letter of the alphabet. I have substituted three of the words on this list with shorter ones suggested by Dmitri himself, because the original terms do not comply with my standards of acceptability which will be outlined shortly.

More Letter Conundrums, Vernon D. Maclauren

Word Ways

It's time to resurrect the letter conundrum from the nineteenth century with some up-to-date examples.

Maggie Had A Little Pigpen, Peter Newby

Word Ways

Pigpen is a cipher system of geometric shapes. Of ancient origin, its current usage is essentially confined to members of various secret societies to the extent that it is often called the Freemason's Code. A non-masonic organization which employed the pigpen cipher was The Knights of the Golden Circle, a white supremacist society which arose in America's postbellum South.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of this issue including instructions to authors.

Strange Connections, Odd Etymologies, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

THere are two ways to try this little teaser: either match the definitions in the left-hand (numbered) column with the words in the right-hand (lettered) column, or (if you really want a different challenge) attempt to guess the words whose origins are given, covering up the right-hand column and working without its help.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Word Containing The Ffl Trigram, Alfred Lubran

Word Ways

Where type is hand set, the type is kept in trays. Among the boxes in the lower-case trays are ones for the ligatures (letters joined on a single piece of type) ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl. Of these, the ligature ffl always looks the newest because it is used least often. Just how infrequently is it used? When I asked the editor, he informed me that Kucera and Francis's million-word sample of text published in the United States in 1962 revealed only 87 occurrences: ffl occurs, on the average, in only one word in ten thousand in running text.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 24 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Subdermatoglyphic: A New Isogram, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Dmitri Borgmann has informed us in the February 1974 and May 1985 Word Ways that the longest English-language isograms (words without repeated letters) are UNCOPYRIGHTABLE and DERMATOGLYPHICS, each iwth fifteen letters. Although the former word uses all six vowels, the latter does not, as it lacks U. An affixed form of either the word or its adjectival cousin, the 14-letter DERMATOGLYPHIC, seemed scientifically and linguistically plausible, employing this unused vowel.

More Insertion-Deletion Networks, Leonard J. Gordon

Word Ways

This is the second of two articles that investigate various properties of the insertion-deletion (ID) networks. The first article appearing in the August 1990 Word Ways, looked at words fully deletable to 2-letter words, as well as words that can be deleted or inserted in every position (charitable and hospitable words). The complexity of the ID network was hinted at with a depiction of the insertion network of CARE.

Groucho Plays Scrabble, John Holgate

Word Ways

It was in the summer of 1952 that HOllywood discovered Scrabble.

Edwin Pitzpatrick, Palindromist, Robert Funt

Word Ways

It is generally agreed among logologists (and more general critics of literature) that Edwin Fitzpatrick is the greatest palindromist of modern times--and that he is, in fact, the only one who consistently elevated this apparently restrictive genre into work whose unlabored eloquence have more to do with lyrical and mystical poetry than the mere mechanics of a verbal tricksterism. He was able to compose full-length novels and plays in strictly symmetrical palindromes and, as we shall see, felt himself no more hampered in his verbal and grammatical choices than would any more original writer in the language.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Mean Words, William Butler Yeats

Word Ways

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

The Poet's Corner

Word Ways

From time to time, Word Ways receives a variety of short poems related to recreational linguistics, some original, other previously published. As poetic output cannot be easily predicted, these will be presented on an irregular basis.

Nautical Creativity, Thomas J. Palumbo

Word Ways

There is a tremendous amount of creativity in the naming of one's boat. Hang around any dock and you will see names of nautical significance (Trafalgar) to family fun (All Smiths). My two favorites, Naughty Naughty (with a rowboat, Just A Little Bit Naughtyon its deck) and Bermuda Schwartz, led to the linguistic activity of creativity naming boats. The rules are simple.

The Letter Conundrum, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Conundrums have been a popular form of word puzzle for well over a century. One form of conundrum appeals especially to the logologist: the one that asks why a specified letter of the alphabet has a certain characteristic. It comes int two varieties according to the form of the answer; in one, the answer depends on the existence of a certain letter in a word, and in the other, the answer depends on the deletion of a letter from a word, forming a new world. In general, the second is more difficult to construct than the first.