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Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Marceauisms, Peter Delin

Word Ways

Sometimes one comes across a quotation that gains enormously in significance when its originator is taken into account. I call such quotations marceauisms since it was the following quotation by the famous mime Marcel Marceau that drew the phenomenon to my attention: "Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?"' This particular example satisfies because of the special association its author and its theme.

Resume Muser 2003, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Nick Montfort and WIlliam Gillespie's recent palindromic page-turner, 2002: A Palindromic Story in 2002 Words (see the back cover of Word Ways, August 2002) inspires this slightly less ambitious offering, entitled...

A Nine-Square With The Remaining Diagonal, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

I have previously published nine-squares with a diagonal word in the NE-SW (=SW-NE) direction. (Nine-Square with Palindromic Diagonal, May 2002), and with a word in the NW-SE direction (A Nine-square with a Non-palindromic Diagonal, November 2002). The square below completes the set, having a word as the SE-NW diagonal.

Sound Spelling, Stuart Kidd

Word Ways

Some years ago now, I was interested to realise that there seemed to be many different spellings in English words of the sound 'SH.' I began collecting these and soon branched into other sound spellings as well. The linguistic term for a sound unit is the phoneme. Now though I dabble in language curiosities I am no linguist, so I realise that I am entering 'tiger country' by presenting this list! Its purpose is more to celebrate the amazing range of phonemic spellings in English - many being obvious borrowings form our parents languages - than to provide any definitive …

My New Pals, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Many of the new palindromes listed in The Palindromicon II (Jeff Grant and Dan Tilque, Word Ways Monograph Series 6, 2002) will, undoubtedly, find their way into Word Ways. The longer palindromes, especially when they are solid words, have a special appeal due to their sheer length. After reading through The Palindromicon II, however, I found my thoughts swelling on the more humble, 5-letter. palindromes.

Bananagrams 21, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams-anagrams to drive you bnaanas-consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair of anagrams to be solved. One of the rhyming words will always be an anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve it. As I am running out of ideas this is my last set.

More Alphabetic Clusters, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In the May 1997 issue of Word Ways, Jeff Grant presented "Alphabetic Clusters", a coming together of words using multiple numbers of each letter of the alphabet. For example, for the letter C he offered the 6-C CHOLANGIOCHOLECYSTOCHOLEDOCHECTOMY and the 5-C COCCOCHROMATIC, and for the letter N he offered the 6-N NONANNOUNCEMENT. To complement Jeff's article, I offer here twenty words discovered on my journeys around the Oxford English Dictionary. Most of these don't improve on Jeff's offerings, some only match this offerings, and others fall short, but are worth recognizing and admitting to the word of logology.

Special Vowel-Consonant Patterns, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Two constraints are imposed on the words offered in this article. The first is by way of their vowel-consonant (V-C) patterns: the second is a numerical one.

Tammy Gave Ev A Gym Mat, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Emily, massage my joint inflammation!

traces of Russian vodka on edge of shot glasses

Alvin is ordered to fire a laser at a group of Bolvian guys

stomach troubles afflicting a hermit

skater Lipinski was in a footrace up a Biblical mountain

Best Scrabble Game, Best Clabbers Game, Stephen C. Root, Nathan Hedt

Word Ways

In past Word Ways issues, Ron Jerome, Ralph Beaman and Jeff Grant presented high-scoring Scrabble games of 4047, 4142, and 4454 points, respectively. All were based on the word BENZOXYCAMPHORS, a word not sanctioned by the National Scrabble Association. The game below, scoring 3986 points, uses only words from the OSPD or Webster's Tenth Collegiate.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

A True Word Square, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Shouldn't a word square be a square array of words rather than a square array of letters? In "Magic Square Magic" in the May 2002 Word Ways, Jeremiah Farrell presented a word square in the former sense. Its novelty may have escaped the casual reader since it was presented as part of a "magic" trick; here the focus is on the square itself, with a challenge for the reader.

Caroline, Neustria, Aeilnorst, Barcelona, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

I've always opined that questions posed and answered in the pages of Word Ways can be researched further and those answers improved on. In this brief piece, I offer improvements to four items published in Word Ways under my name during the past three decades.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Pangrammatic Crosswords, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The November 2002 Colloquy presented a 3x14 crossword grid devised by Chris McManus which contains all 26 letters of the alphabet once each.

New German Triple-Letter Words, Jim Puder

Word Ways

A supplement to The Pocket Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1997) reports that the governments of Germany, Austria and Switzerland agreed in 1996 to reform the spellings changes resulted in the creation of over one hundred new triple-letter words.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 36 Issue 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Peppertree: The Logological Holy Grail, Dave Morice

Word Ways

Some words are interesting because they have a unique, outstanding property. Howard Bergerson has noted that TWENTY-NINE is spelled with letters made of lines only -- 29 of them. (The real magic of this simple fact can be experienced by counting each line along the way.) Dave Morice once observed that AMBIDEXTROUS ("capable of using both hands with equal ease") is alphabetically ambidextrous: its left half, AMBIDE, uses letters from the left half of the alphabet, and its right half, XTROUS, uses letter from the right half of the alphabet. If the letters of OUI (French YES) are each shifted …

The Debunking Of Torpenhow Hill, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In his book, Beyond Language (1967), Dmitri Borgmann posed a problem and offered a solution that have both gone unremarked until now, over 35 years later. For those who don't have the book, here is part of Problem 35. Etymological Eccentricities.

Pangram Competition, William Shortz

Word Ways

If typists ever want a replacement for the old chestnut "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", do I have some suggestions! Below are my favorite sentences submitted by National Public Radio "Weekend Edition Sunday" listeners in a creative pangram competition on September 22 and 29, 2002. Each sentence uses all 26 letters of the alphabet at least once (that's a pangram) and contains the name of a famous person (the extra requirement of the contest). Out of thousands of entries, I selected the following on the basis of brevity, meaning, naturalness of syntax, and (sometimes) their ability …

Quarter Ten-Squares, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A tautonym was originally the same word repeated for genus and species, though in Word Ways it is used of a single word consisting of two identical halves, such as Wallawalla, a North American Indian people (OED). I take it that it is not necessary for the two halves to have the same meaning, is for the semantic split to occur also in the middle. Suppose we start a 10-letter word square with a tautonym ABCDEABCDE. The second row must begin with B, say BFGHI (we will just use the first half for brevity), the third with CG, eg CGJKL, …

Ten-Square With Place Names, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Although the words in the following square only score 36 out of 50 on my crude scale of merit (because of proper names and spaces), the square as a whole deserves better, as all names are places, and from the same source.

Sighted Rhymes, Sank Same, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Sight rhymes are rhymes that look like rhymes. They have the same ending letters that you would find in rhyming words but, alas, the combinations of letters are pronounced differently. Such is the nature of the English language.

Roots And Branches: A Simplified Diagram, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

As he clearly implies, the full picture of the roots and branches of a word can be an "intertwining tangle". A particular word may be reached via several different transdeletions (or transadditions), and the resulting diagram can be confusing, with many lines crossing each other, and there being no clear indication of the structure.

Bb And The Rebusgram

Word Ways

BB is a rebus. In fact it's a rebus of rebus: "Re-B us". In this article I mainly explore the one-letter rebus, its opposite the "antirebus" and their use in higher dimensional constructions I call "rebusgrams". I close with a quiz-full of multiple-letter rebus puzzles.

Verse, Cursed: Double Dactylic Sacrilege, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

As all card-carrying recreational linguists know, the double dactyl is a serious light verse form comprising two quatrains, with each line -- except the final, rhyming lines of the quatrains -- consisting of two dactylic feet, and in which the first line must be a nonsense reduplication; the second line a proper name; and the penultimate or antepenultimate line one double dactylic word. For complete rules, origins, scholarship and numerous cerebral examples

Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Part 2), Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Part 1 of the article listed V-C patterns in 7- and 8-letter words. Part 2 repeats the exercise for 9-letter words and then analyses the 7-, 8-, and 9-letter V-C patterns.

More Palindromes, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

The following palindromes are additional to those listed in Palindromicon II. Although I have removed some candidates, those below are accompanied by sufficient information that the reader can accept or reject each as desired. My own criteria for acceptance differ from those of the Palindromicon, so this list is not precisely an addition to that work. However, I, like it, have omitted almost all initialism (CFC), also musical terms (fff), Roman numerals (MCM), chess notation (PxP), and international vehicle registrations (GBG), except for one or two. Abbreviations like Mdm, and morpheme-medial clusters like rtr are also omitted. The list is …