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English And What Does She Mean?, Charlton Lawrence Edholm

Word Ways

I had just been reading an impassioned denunciation of one more attempt to force a simplified system of spelling down the throat of a long-suffering public. All my literary sympathies were engaged in the phrase "The noble old language of Chaucer and Shakespeare is sufficiantly simplified for us" when a newly-landed friend from Berlin approached and began his daily course in "English and What does She Mean?"

A Verse Of Necromancy, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

"Lieutenant Arthur Jamison." A stocky middle-aged man with black hair streaked with gray looked up at me.

I handed him my card. "Miss Rose Anderson said you had no objection if I discussed with you the disappearance of her fiance, Homer Rosswell."

Kickshaws, Murray Pearce

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

A Name Game, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

When I was at Princeton, we called it the Princeton Name Game and argued that the challenge was to invent a name that would completely conquer the admissions director and gain the bearer instant acceptance.

The Albatros In Ferdinand Bolstraat, Rudy Kousbroek

Word Ways

Editor's Note: The following story, the second chapter of de logologische Ruimte (Meulenhoff, 1984), exhibits the odd juxtapositions that result from transaddition (adding letters to a word and rearranging to form another word).

The Palindromes Of Mangareva, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Mangareva is the largest of the Gambier Islands, a small group situated within the Tuamotu Archipelago in the the eastern Pacific. The Islands were discovered by Captain Wilson of the "Duff" on 25 May 1797, and he named them after the British naval commander Admiral Lord Gambier.

The Only Man Infinity Fears, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

John Candelaria of Yucaipa, California is a man who leads two lives. At work he is a mild-mannered Clark Kent, scientific illustrator and surveyor at Caltrans (occuped with traffic-flow studies and highway planning); at home, he becomes the man of steel, effortlessly vaulting past such mega-numbers as the googol (one followed by one hundred zeros) the googolplex (ten raised to the googol power), Archimedes' number (one followed by 80 quadrillion zeros, and Graham's number (a number so immense that it takes a page of specially-invented notation to define it).

The Most Fecund Consonyms, Dana Richards

Word Ways

Words that have the same pattern of consonants, such as BeTRaY and oBiTuaRY, euTHaNaSia and aTHeNS, SPoNGe and eSPioNaGe, KNoW and oKiNaWa, iCHNeuMoN and CHiNaMan, and oRCHeSTRa and RoCHeSTeR, are known as consonyms.

Pneumonoultramicrostuff, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

In 1932, Frank Scully wrote Fun In Bed, a book of light-hearted anecdotes and puzzles for the diversion and amusement of the hospitalized patient.

Four Byte Word Text News, John Henrick

Word Ways

Had he been a novelist, rather than a lyricist, Cole Porter might never have made the musical claim that contemporary novelists use only four-letter words in their writings. Whether the assertion is viewed as prevarication or exaggeration, one thing is clear. No known novel, present or past, has the characteristic proclaimed in "Anything Goes."

Front Cover And Publication Information - Volume 19, Number 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Ad Memoriam Demetrii, Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

The Wombat was, I could tell, in a somber mood when he recieved me in his rural retreat in Fauquier County, Virginia. His dark clothing seemed to reflext his frame of mind; and on the Florentine credenza stood, not the colorful array of comestibles which I was wont to see there, but a large bedewed pitcher of nearly black liquid, a silver plate of black chocolate confections, and a platter, likewise argent, of delicate sandwiches of some black bread.

All End-Letters Different In A Poem, Willard R. Espy

Word Ways

In the July 22, 1972 New Yorker magazine there appeared the following sonnet by George Starbuck...

Dudeney's Lost Word-Puzzle, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Most readers of Word Ways are aware that Henry Ernest Dudeney, England's most distinguished puzzleist, was interested in words as well as numbers.

A Puzzling Past, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

The year is 1896. You live on a small farm in upstate New York. The cows have been milked, the pigs slopped, supper eaten and the dishes washed, and you and your wife sit down by the light of a kerosene lamp and several candles to read the latest issue of the weekly newsmagazine, The American Agriculturalist.

Dr. Awkward And Olson In Oslo, Lawrence Levine

Word Ways

The long voyage between my first tentative effort at constructing a short palindrome of some forty letters, and the eventual completion of a palindromic novel numbering 31,594 words (or approximately 104,000 letters) some twenty years later, was an unrelenting lesson in many disciplines. There were lessons in trial and error, in logic, in vocabulary, in syntactics, and a wide-ranging lexical development that I never thought possible. Although I had always considered myself a more than ordinary lover of my native language, I had never before realized how metamorphic and submissive was this extraordinary English tongue, until the day I began …

Mary Had A Univocalic Lamb, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

According to Tony Augarde's Oxford Guide to Word Games, univocalics are writings that make use of only one vowel. This is apparently an old form of word play, as Augarde gives several examples from the nineteenth century, including one that dates back to 1824.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Monogrammonyms, Jay Ames

Word Ways

Some time ago I read an article on one-letter surnames as listed by the United States Internal Revenue Service, and a similar one by the Immigration Department.

Wordplay In Radio Contests, Raymond D. Love

Word Ways

An automobile dealer in Tuscon, Arizona ran a radio commercial in October 1985 which featured a word game. The advertisement was on twelve different stations, and saturated the airways for two weeks with six to eight spots a day. It was the talk of the town.

Undergrounders, Vernon Maclaren

Word Ways

Here is my collection of Undergrounders to add to the ones presented by Dmitri Borgmann in the February 1986 Word Ways

Oklahoma-Missouri Sign Language, Eugene J. Ulrich

Word Ways

All of us at one time or another have seen bizarre spelling or language used in signs or notices put up by individuals, organizations or businesses. I would like to share with you some that I've met with in certain fringe-of-the-Ozarks areas of Oklahoma and Missouri.

The Debasement Of Love, Kay Haugaard

Word Ways

The first morning my husband and I were in England on holiday, the landlady came into the breakfast room of our bed and breakfast lodgings carrying our fried eggs, bangers, grilled tomatoes, soggy toast and my inky black tea and asked cheerily, "Did you sleep well, Love?"

The Apple-Sauce Chronicles, Louis Phillips

Word Ways

Word Ways resumes this anthology of light-hearted wordplay (see the May 1984 and November 1984 issues) with the perennial favorite, What's the Question (orginated by Steve Allen in 1958).

Whose What?, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

In the English Language, there are a great many common expressions that are built on the formula whose what, that is, a possessive noun plus a noun. To discover just how many of these little phrases have become established, try filling in the blanks below. Answers appear at the end of this issue.

Words From State Name Abbreviations, Bruce Pyne

Word Ways

Almost all lists of words appearing in Word Ways use single letters as units to construct words. Suppose instead that we choose two-letter combinations, or bigrams, as units.

D'Ou Etes-Vous Revisited, The Word Wurcher

Word Ways

D'Ou Etes-Vous deals with a phenomenon which has always been of interest to me. Not only in French, but in Russian as well, the naming of people from their places of origin is very complicated.

Foreign Ideas, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

With thousands of foreign terms in use in our language, it might be asked, very slightly misquoting Rudyard Kipling, "What does he know of English who only English knows?" We are almost as likely to encounter the Latin respice finem or the French of LaFontaine reminding us in all things to consider the final outcome as the English consider the bottom line.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover, including instructions to authors wishing to contribute to the publication.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic Kickshaws