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Answers And Solutions May 1980

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

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Back Cover May 1980

Back Cover

Word Ways

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

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Reversible Word Ladders, Tom Pulliam May 1980

Reversible Word Ladders, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

In the February 1979 Kickshaws, the late R. Robinson Rowe proposed Word Ladders which successfully reverse the letters of a given word. To judge from the discussion there, he actually found only two examples of four-letter reversals.

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Three-Letter Hex-Words, A. Ross Eckler May 1980

Three-Letter Hex-Words, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

It is well known that hexagons can be used to tile a flat surface with no space left over. If letters are inscribed in the hexagons, a three-letter word can be formed by a set of three hexagons meeting at a common point. No rearrangement of letters is necessary; the word can always be spelled out by going either clockwise or counterclockwise around the point. Because this property does not hold for square tiling (four-letter words) or triangular tiling (six-letter words), hexagonal tiling is uniquely suited for the various letter patterns we described in this article.

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Letter-Frequencies In Car Names, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1980

Letter-Frequencies In Car Names, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

At a regional meeting of the National Puzzlers' League held at Kingston, New Jersey in November 1979, Arthur K. Harris presented a word game in which participants were asked to add C, A, and R to groups of letters and rearrange these to form car names. The purpose of this article is to guage the extent car-namers may have favored these three letters; do they appear more often than in a random selection of dictionary words?

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Biographical Link-O-Grams, Boris Randolph Feb 1980

Biographical Link-O-Grams, Boris Randolph

Word Ways

If Geographical Link-O-Grams, why not Biographical ones, too? The following words link the first and last names of 60 well-known people; fill in the blanks with letters to complete. Answers are in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

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Shiftgrams, Tom Pulliam Feb 1980

Shiftgrams, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

Take a word (for example, MUSIC), shift each letter n steps along the alphabet arranged in a circle with A following Z (for example, M eight steps to U, U eight steps to C, S eight steps to A, I eight steps to Q, C eight steps to K), and rearrange the resulting letters to form another word (for example, UCAQK to QUACK). Howard Bergerson, writing under a pseudonym, christened QUACK a shiftgram of MUSIC in "Sea-Changed Words" in the February 1969 Word Ways. Multiple shiftgrams are possible; however, the theoretical maximum of 26 shiftgrams of a word is impossible …

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Limerick-Gimerick, Maxey Brooke Feb 1980

Limerick-Gimerick, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

It has been claimed that the limerick is the only fixed poetry form indigenous to the English language. This may or may not be true. In his book The Limerick (Bell Publishing Co., New York, 1964), a collection of very blue limericks, G. Legman traces the origin of the verse form back to the very beginnings of Anglo-Saxon literature. Most of his illustrations are rather forced.

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Platonic Relationships, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1980

Platonic Relationships, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the November 1978 Kickshaws, Harry and Mary Hazard presented a word game in which two players alternately label with letters the vertices of a cube, each player's object being to form words encircling the square faces and block the other player from doing this. The game suggested the following challenge: label the vertices of each of the five Platonic solids with letters of the alphabet, none repeated, so that words can be formed out of the letters assigned to the vertices of each face.

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Palmer Peterson, Master Formist, Philip M. Cohen Feb 1980

Palmer Peterson, Master Formist, Philip M. Cohen

Word Ways

The following article is my abridgement of one written as a National Puzzlers' League memorial to Palmer Peterson, who died in June 1979 at the age of 77. Few present-day word buffs are aware of the enormous work that went into the construction of giant forms in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of the precursors of the crossword puzzle, forms are mini-crosswords of regular shape with no black squares.

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The Sator Square Revisited, Harry B. Partridge Feb 1980

The Sator Square Revisited, Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

In the November 1979 Word Ways there was an interesting challenging article by Dmitri A. Borgmann called "Palindromes: The Rotas Square."

I was glad to see the Master Logologist return to the problem of the Sator square, about which he said in his Language on Vacation (p. 208), "The treatment we have given the 'Sator' square is far from adequate, partly for lack of space, partly because we don't happen to care for it ...."

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Word Squares Using Many Letters, Jeff Grant Feb 1980

Word Squares Using Many Letters, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

What is the largest number of different letters that can be used in a word square? For word squares of size three, many are known which employ nine different letters; the editor suggests that the one at the right uses the commonest words.

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Soup To Nuts: A Poe-Puree Of Puns, Fred Abrams Feb 1980

Soup To Nuts: A Poe-Puree Of Puns, Fred Abrams

Word Ways

In Poe's awesome tale of vengeance, the narrator Montresor reveals to the reader the circumstances which prompted him to commit a perfect crime 50 years before: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge." On the pretext of having Fortunato sample some newly acquired Amontillado, Montresor had enticed him into the vaults beneath his castle. There the inebriated Fortunato was taken by surprise, chained into a crypt, and and walled up alive with mortar and stone. Poe, a clever punster, scattered many puns throughout his tales. Following …

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Internal Tautonyms, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1980

Internal Tautonyms, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In "Alfalfa and All That" in the November 1978 Word Ways, Leroy F. Meyers presented a variety of English and foreign words containing unhyphenated internal tautonyms. This article extends his work by classifying internal tautonyms in two ways -- by the repetition period, and by the length of the tautonymic part.

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On Again, Off Again, Leonard R. N. Ashley Feb 1980

On Again, Off Again, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Here are fifty idioms you can work on, easy once you catch onto the fact that each one is on about a phrase in which the word ON is featured. Go on, try it ...

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Kickshaws, Richard Lederer Feb 1980

Kickshaws, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Alphabetizing The Integers, Edward R. Wolpow Feb 1980

Alphabetizing The Integers, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Only an infinitesimal part of all integers have English-language names. NI3 allows us to name, gaplessly, all the integers up to 1063 (one vigintillion), and, by using standard terminology, up to 1066 - 1 (nine hundred ninety-nine vigintillion, nine hundred ... thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine). There follows a huge unnamed gap up to 10303 (one centillion). If all the integers up to 1066 - 1 were written out, they could, in theory, be alphabetized. Let us decide to eliminate the 'and's from alphabetization, and further stipulate that the higher powers of ten must be preceded by …

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Answers And Solutions Feb 1980

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

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Back Cover Feb 1980

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover including instructions for authors wishing to submit articles.

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Palindromes: The Rotas Prehistory, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1980

Palindromes: The Rotas Prehistory, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

It was the third discovery of the rotas square that finally cast disrepute upon the third century A.D. dating of its origin. Systematic excavations of the ruins of Pompeii sponsored by the Italian government had revealed, in an open area southeast of the entangled remains of that city, a spacious palaestra or campus that had sustained some damage by tremors of Vesuvius prior to the violent eruption of 79 A.D.

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Front Cover And Publication Information Feb 1980

Front Cover And Publication Information

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue, including the table of contents.

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The Name Is The Game, Richard E. Douglass Feb 1980

The Name Is The Game, Richard E. Douglass

Word Ways

We've all known people whose names or nicknames indicated that their parents had a sense of humor, if not compassion or good taste. One of the most highly noted examples of frivolous appellation was Ima Hogg, the highly-regarded philanthropist. The actor Rip Torn's real name is Rip Torn, and in popular fiction, Perry Mason's courtroom adversary was Hamilton "Ham" Burger.

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Colloquy Feb 1980

Colloquy

Word Ways

Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, corrections and comments about earlier articles appearing in Word Ways. Comments received up to a month prior to publication of an issue will appear in that issue.

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"…For Franklin Fanciers", Jeremiah Farrell Jan 1980

"…For Franklin Fanciers", Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Crossword Puzzle featured on page 82 of the October, 1980 edition of the Saturday Evening Post.

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Split-Ups, Jeremiah Farrell Jan 1980

Split-Ups, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jeremiah Farrell's contribution to the Simon and Schuster Crossword Puzzle Book, edited by Margaret Farrar and Eugene T. Maleska.

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Don’T Heed The Animals, Jeremiah Farrell Jan 1980

Don’T Heed The Animals, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jeremiah Farrell's contribution to "Will Weng's Crossword Puzzles" vol. 11, edited by Will Weng.

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Shakespearean Crosswords, Brian Head Nov 1979

Shakespearean Crosswords, Brian Head

Word Ways

It is fairly well known that, according to the generally accepted history of the puzzles, crosswords were first created in the USA in 1913 and crossed the Atlantic to Great Britain some eleven years later. In fact, a study of much of literature shows this to be false, and reveals innumerable earlier references to crosswords. The works of William Shakespeare provide a particularly rich source of such allusions.

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Answers And Solutions Nov 1979

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

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Quotable Quotes, Darryl Francis Nov 1979

Quotable Quotes, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In my library I have several volumes of collected quotations, both familiar and unfamiliar. I recently decided to dig up some quotations that might be of interest to readers of Word Ways -- quotations about words, language, speech, dictionaries and so on. Forty of the quotations are given in this article. Savor them, think about them; do you agree with each quotation? or disagree? Some of the quotations seem to be contradicted by others -- for example, look at the first two in the list below. However, such contradictions should only serve to make the quotations more enjoyable.

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Put In Some More Good Words, Charles W. Bostick Nov 1979

Put In Some More Good Words, Charles W. Bostick

Word Ways

This is the second of a pair of articles which invites the reader to use his deductive abilities on lists of words; the first article appeared in the August 1979 Word Ways. His task is first to find a common property that the 24 words in a list share, and second to insert the word at the head of this list (given in capital letters) into its proper place within the list.

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