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Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

A Bilingual Pun Is Twice The Fun, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

The all-time prize for transmitting the fullest message with the greatest compactness must go to Sir Charles James Napier. In 1843, Napier quelled an uprising in the Indian province of Sind and announced his triumph via telegram to his commanders in London. All he wrote was the one word Peccavi.

Palindromic Habitations, Andrea Cantrell

Word Ways

A street's a street, right? Only when you can ignore street signs and maps! I once had to criss-cross an entire city because I had failed to note if an address was on Canyon Lane or Canyon Terrace. Whether they are written out or abbreviated, it is important to pay careful attention to designations for roads, routes, avenues, places, lanes, squares, terraces, circles, heights, and plain old streets.

Fledge Ledge Edge, Jan Anderson

Word Ways

From the last issue's Ledge Edge we peered mostly at the missing: intentionally omitted words, vowels and syllables. Now we flap away from the "eschewed" and go espying the askew--odd assortments and arrangements of what is there. But as with my mother's elves, you have to start flying before you can see them. You didn't know about my mother's elves? They were a family secret, and my father never admitted to getting the note she wrote about them, but then maybe he didn't get it -- "Ed: odd, I am nuts. I flew. As I did, I saw elf! I …

Number Name Equations, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

123 can be expressed as a number name in one of two basic ways: ONE HUNDRED (AND) TWENTY THREE (the British include and, the Americans exclude and) or ONE TWO THREE. Dmitri Borgmann illustrated both in the November 1985 Colloquy. Assigning A=1, B=2, etc., he constructed TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE = 251, ONE FOUR SIX = 146 and TWO OUGHT OUGHT = 200. (He defended the last one by noting that ought is given as a variant of aught in the Collegiate dictionaries).

Top-Down Seems Best In Full Searches, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In "Designing a List of Word Squares" (August 1996), I showed that a word list intended for finding squares is improved by balancing the beginning and ending letter-frequencies of words. In "Bottom-Up Finds Some Squares Faster" (November 1996) I showed that under certain conditions the old formists' bottom-up strategy is superior to a top-down one.

Wright, Write 'Rite' Right, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

The May, August and November 1996, Word Ways described the results of a National Public Radio competition of December 1995 in which listeners were challenged to write grammatical and understandable sentences containing the same word four or more times in a row. Some listeners incorrectly assumed that a stutter of sounds would qualify, and constructed sequences of homonyms instead of identically-spelled words. These logologically-interesting results are presented in the following (and final) article. (A few are questionable, relying perhaps on regional pronunciations.)

Absolute Difference Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

LONGEST WORDS

This article is a continuation of "Word Arithmetic" from the November Word Ways. Dmitri Borgmann is Beyond Language gave the four-letter absolute difference word FORM = 6 15 18 13 becomes 9 3 5 ICE. In "Difference Words" in the August 1971 Word Ways, Ross Eckler found in Webster's Collegiate 15 five-letter words such as SAFER and CHILD and three six-letter words from elsewhere: ELDEST, RETAIN, FRITOS. In "Difference Words Ride Again" in the August 1975 issue, Tom Pulliam added 10 more six-letter words from Webster's Unabridged, Second and Third editions.

Word Sums (No Carrying!), Frank Rubin

Word Ways

The simplest form of arithmetic that we all learn in grade school is addition. Each of us has spent countless hours over problems like 123 + 456 = 579.

Confessions Of A Psycho Killer, Mark Saltveit

Word Ways

Two detectives, Ed and Dave, were interrogating the prime suspect in a suburban murder spree. The accused, obviously deranged, answered only in present tense palindromes.

The Abc's Of Anglish, Peter Newby

Word Ways

Anglish is English of the logical neologist. It consists of sportmanteaux (the perfect qwaint is self-explanatory) and triviana (contrived trivia such as the palindrome ATAVADAVATA or the alphabetically progressive ABAVADAE). Pundigroans (contrived pundigroins or puns) are tolerated by only in small number. The acid test of an Anglish word is that it has the potential for assimilation into English just as the language of the Angles became a strand of the vocabulary which continues to develop as English. The following is a mere sample:

A Reedable-Deerable Alphabet, Nyr Indictor

Word Ways

Word pairs such as REJECTED-DEJECTER, RESERVED-DESERVER, and REDUCED-DEDUCER fall into the special class of anagrams which we may call "reed-deer pairs". One member of the pair begins with RE- and ends with ED-, while the other begins with DE- and ends with -ER. If the pair is DEDEERED and DEREEDED, we are left with an identical middle component. A person who isolates these middle components is both a DEDEERER and a DEREEDER. The middle ocmponent can be REREEDED and REDEERED (by a REREEDER and REDEERER) to form the original pair again.

Southern Fried Churches, Mary Christie Craig

Word Ways

My husband says that a Presbyterian, which he grew up as, in a cold, intellectual, well-read Baptist. On the other hand, a Baptist is a warm-hearted, ignorant Presbyterian. I can say this because I am one-- a Baptist, that is.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Numerical Palindromes: Part 2, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

"Numerical Palindromes: Part 1", by Susan Thorpe in the November 1996 Word Ways, dealt with what I described as numerical palindromes of order 2. It was her work that led to my own effort.

Bringing Home The Cryptographic Bacon, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

For the more than one hundred years various iconoclasts have speculated that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Some have searched for indications in the Shakespearean corpus that Bacon cryptographically hid some statement of his authorship.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 29 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Phallicdromes, Howard Richler

Word Ways

My friend and colleague Richard Lederer just published a delightful book called "Nothing Risque, Nothing Gained" (reviewed in November 1995 Word Ways) that features virtually every form of ribald wordplay. Missing from this collection, however, are bawdy palindromes. Here in alphabetical order are some naughty palindromes I've dubbed Phallicdromes.

Bottom-Up Finds Some Squares Faster, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

"Designing a List For Word Squares" in the August 1996 Word Ways shows that a word list intended for finding squares can be improved by balancing letter frequencies. In general, we want the fraction at which that letter exists in the word-stock. In particular, we want to enhance the fraction of words beginning with e,i,n or o (and to a limited extent beginning with a or u), and the fraction of words ending with a,i,o or u.

Placename Isogramy, Dan Tilque

Word Ways

Out in the far reaches of Long Island lies the town of Bridgehampton. This name, being a fairly long isogram, has often caught my attention in my periodic perusals of various atlases. It is, as far as I know, the longest solidly written placename isogram in the United Sates.

Moore Or Less The Night Before Christmas, Jan Anderson

Word Ways

In turning a poem on its opposite pole, the parodist must be wary of exact opposites to the author's words. They don't always reverse the sense, and they can land you back in the original meaning. Just as two negatives make a positive, "what should appear" = "it can't stay hidden." Keep a copy of Clement Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" next to you to keep track and compare.

Word Arithmetic, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article attempts to provide a taxonomy and nomenclature for that type of wordplay which involves manipulating the numerical equivalents of letters in words. Later articles will present results for two particular sub-species of manipulation: absolute difference words and cyclic difference words.

The Imperial Sotadic Legacy, Walter Fretlaw

Word Ways

DRAT SADDAM A MAD DASTARD is worthy of ranking among the classic English-language palindromes and yet no one seems willing to claim authorship. By contrast, ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA is grudgingly attributed to Napoleon even though such an authority as Howard Bergerson, in his Palindrome and Anagrams (Dover, 1973), hints that the notoriously modest Leigh Mercer may have had some association with it.

A New Look At The Jotto Problem, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

The so-called Jotto problem--construct five five-letter words out of 25 different letters--was examined in the first issue of Word Ways on February 1968. Why is it called this? If one's guess word in the two-person game of Jotto is scored 0 (no letters in common with the target word), one's next guess should be a word containing no letters in common with the first one.

Eulerian Magic Word Squares, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In the May 1933 Word Ways, Lee Sallows introduced a form of gematria he called wints (word integers), based on the use of the alphabet and a space to express numbers in base 27. (In normal gementria, A=1, B=2, etc.) His article included 3x3 and 4x4 magic squares made from wints and found by computer search. In May 1996 he presented additional 3x3 squares found by computer search. In the original article, many of the magic constants were wints. This was not true for the later set. Most are simply Euler squares which become magic for any gematria.

Numerical Palindromes: Part 1, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

At first sight, RESEDACEAE (the plant family to which the mignonette belongs) is not a palindrome. But it is--in disguise! When its ten letters are split into two equal groups of five letters each, and the letter assigned the values A=1, B=2, ... RESED- totals 51 whilst -ACEAE totals 15.

Asteroid Prediction Tricks, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

Someone chooses a letter from the word ASTEROID, and your task is to ask questions until you can identify the chooser's letter. If the questions are of the form "which of the following tow words contains your letter?", two are sufficient for identification: