Digital Commons Network^™

Balanced Dreams, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A TELETYPE OPERATOR,ERNEST MULLER GLOOMILY SORTED PENS and DOSSIERS in the ETON SQUARE office - a RITUAL! With BUSINESS at its LAXEST (would it REVIVE?) and the APPOINTMENTS book empty, he no longer NURSED any DOUBTS about OPTING for an UNAUTHORIZED break. He hired the APTEST "TEMP", left a NOTE for his COWORKER, ANOTHER FOR THE telephonist (re their ROTA), and locked up SECURELY, as ALWAYS. He never FORGOT.

An Exceptional Story, Robert C. Layton

Word Ways

The temperature was more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit as I lay on my keister in the shade of an oak tree relaxing at the babbling weir of Anaheim Creek. My enjoyment was enhanced by several heirfers stopping to drink, and a skein of ducks flying at a considerable height above the forest. The event was a nonpareil leisure occurrence.

The Proper Name In The Proper Use, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

You don't have to be a Sherlock to fill in most of the blanks here, but a few of the names in these slang expressions are somewhat less common than others and may give you some trouble. If you get them all, you're an Einstein. Answers are found in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

More Mixed Reviews, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

GREAT EXPECTATIONS expert stage action [M Boltizar]

THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE gee, movie rated "the cutest" [MJ Hazard]

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH Heston weathers the argot [D Sandler]

HALLOWE'EN o, a new hell [M Hall, R Pivarnik] awe! hell, no [L Picarella, S Bickerstaff]

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.

Split Wit Definitives, Howard Richler

Word Ways

The following is an outgrowth of two articles I wrote for National Lampoon in 1990 entitled "Split Definitive". It was thus titled because it featured word definitions that depend upon the splitting of words to effect the definitions. For example, romantic was defined as "Conturion's twitch" because it can be divided into Roman and tic. Similarly, heathen was defined as "barbecued chicken" and it breaks down into heat and hen.

A Challenge Answered, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

In the August Word Ways I challenged readers to find the smallest rectangle in which one can pack the 37 different US presidential surnames with at least one name in each of the eight possible directions (but connectivity not required). My answer to this challenge is shown below, an 18x12 = 216 rectangle in which FILLMORE does not connect to nay other; each diagonal direction has a single representative.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 27 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Games On Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

The rules of our proposed games are very simple. Two persons alternately draw letter titles until one of them is first able to form a word and wins. To avoid arguments, we supply for each game its own dictionary of allowed words. To make the games more interesting, we have certain symmetry demands on dictionary word lists and will call such lists configurations.

Getting It All Together, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

Recently, several Word Ways contributors have suggested relationships between wordplay and chemistry (see "The Linguistic Genetic Message" Feb 1992, and the note on The Scientist Speculates in Feb 1994). Although none of the ideas appealed to me, I found the concept intriguing, and devised something of my own. In this article, I model protein chemistry wit ha combination of two different types of directed word chains. In addition, constructions from the combination chaining leads to interesting logology.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Balanced Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

'Balanced Words' anagrams to 'An ABCDE's World'. It is certainly that! Ironically, the word 'balanced' is not itself a balanced word, but INTRODUCTION and CONTRARILY are. (In this article, words in capital letters are balanced.) So, what is a balanced word? When the sum of the letters of a word (using A=1, B=2 etc.) is divided by the number of letters in the word, the result is the 'average letter weight' of that word which, in the case of balanced words, is 13.5, halfway through the alphabet between M and N.

Clipped Words

Word Ways

The increasing practice of comitting large amounts of text, such as dictionaries and thesauri, to computer-based utilities has produced a number of text-compression techniques for reducing the amount of storage space. There are several industry-standard-file-compression utilities in the public domain, any of which may be used to condense the space requirements of text files. My WORDS-WORTH files, now containing over 508,000 dictionary words and phrases, were first processed in this fashion, resulting in roughly a 50% saving in disk space. However, files treated in this way need in the majority of cases to be restored to full length in order …

The Morristown Fables: Part 3, Peter Newby

Word Ways

"Tuesday" said the hen perched on the mantelpiece.

Anagramania, Charles Suhor

Word Ways

Some lovers of language are merely smitten, others are outright crazy. I'm in the former category, so I devised an even dozen anagrams for the word anagram and let it go at that.

Half-Palindromic Words, Mark Saltveit

Word Ways

I have never understood all of the interest in finding palindromic words. It requires no imagination; they just sit there in front of the reader, like a large gold nugget on the sidewalk. And, like gold nuggets, all but the most hidden and obscure ones have long since been grabbed.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Mixed Reviews, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the February 1993 issue, Games Magazine editor Will Shortz announced a new puzzle contest based on a Word Ways idea: anagram a movie title to form a concise review of the film (for example, "oh. OK" for Hook, "I, trash" for Ishtar, or "non-cinema" for Encino Man). More than 700 readers submitted several thousand entries for the prize, $1000 worth of puzzles and books from the Bits & Pieces catalog; it was awarded to James Sempsrott of Raleigh NC who suggested "not worth a fire engine" for The Towering Inferno.

Caulfield And Copperfield, Robert F. Fleissner

Word Ways

Surely a major irony of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is that its would-be hero, though openly disdaining what he calls all that "David Copperfield" kind of nonsense on the very first page, is in fact described in terms of the self-development novel as stemming to a large extent from Dickens. What is more, though he repeatedly exhibits revulsion at what he dubs the "phony" type of individual, he himself turns out to be the biggest fake of them all.

Cheater's Palindromes: Part 4, Walter Fretlaw

Word Ways

David Jennings Morice is the fourth of the Kickshavian school of Cheater's palindromists and, essentially, the pioneer of the concept of utilizing obscure terminology in this form of creative construction. David is the Cheater's playwright and all quotes are from his short-short-lived play which was first performed in Iowa City in 1990.

Mammary Vowelindromes, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The association between vowelindromes and the female breast, noted by Stephen Chism in the August 1993 Word Ways, is even more widespread than he realizes. Besides PAP and TIT, both part of the vowelindromes PAP-PEP-PIP-POP-PUP and TAT-TET-TIT-TOT-TUT, there exist BUB (a woman's breast) and DUD (a teat). The words in the corresponding vowelindromes BAB-BEB-BIB-BOB-BUB can all be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, and DAD-DED-DID-DOD-DUD in the English Dialect Dictionary.

Playing The Numbers Game, Al Greengold, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

The joys of word play abound all around, even in numbers. We often view figures as coldly symbolic rather than vibrantly verbal, but numerals really can be a lot of fun when we look at them logologically.

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.

Gag Me With A Spoonerism, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Perhaps you know somebody (and that somebody could be you!) who occasionally says pascetti or spaghetti, aminal for animal, and revelant for relevant. Each of these mispronunciations bespeaks a tendency to anticipate and, hence, to switch sounds between words.

Getting Around In Wordland, Leonard Gordon

Word Ways

Over the years, Word Ways has presented several articles on word chains and networks. It was obvious that the networks could be developed into mazes, but I, for one, did nothing about it because I considered mazes kid stuff. However, John Harris sent me a copy of a maze by Robert Abbott that appeared in the May 1991 Discover magazine which is not kid stuff.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 27 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Etaoin Shrdlu Non-Crashing Sets, Donald E. Knuth

Word Ways

The designers of the Linotype machine arranged its keyboard for optimum speed, assuming that the most common letters of English were e,t,a,o,i,n,s,h,r,d,l,u in that order. The Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) has some amusing citations: