Digital Commons Network^™

Jack And The Twoderful Beans, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Many years ago, the comedian and pianist Victor Borge invented the idea of inflationary language. Since prices keep going up, Borge reasoned, why shouldn't language go up, too? In the English langage there are words that contain the sounds of numbers, like wonder, before and decorate. If we inflate each sound by one, we come up with twoder, befive, and decornine. Here is an original passage that will allow you to read and hear inflationary language in all its inflated grandeur. Try your eye and ear at translating this text back into regular English.

Last Man Circuit: Circumstantial, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

In case of my death, please deliver to Police. Leonard Fromken

More Sound-Spelling Correspondences, Mark Isaak

Word Ways

This article is a sequel to "Sound-Spelling Correspondences" in the May 1985 Word Ways, providing additional spellings for the indicated pronunciations. All have been taken from Webster's Third Edition.

Colloquy

Word Ways

Responses to previously published articles

One More Charade Crossword, Ernst Theimer

Word Ways

Of all crossword puzzles, I find the charade crossword the most enjoyable. in this type of crossword, the clues do not directly define the word to be found. The word is buried as a charade in a sentence.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 18 Number 2

Word Ways

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

Wordplay In Ancient Greece, Dana Richards

Word Ways

The Greek Anthology is a collection of Greek poetry compiled by Constantine Cephalas during the 10th century, known today from the only extant copy in the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. David Singmaster recently discovered that this work contains hundreds of mathematical puzzles. his 1984 article on this topic in the Mathematical Spectrum gives an excellent overview of these; however, they are rarely challenging and often repetitive.

Clothes Encounters, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Names of businesses, especially small Mom-and-Pop ones, are a fertile source of wordplay. This is especially evident in beauty parlor and barbershop nomenclature, extensively documented in "Hair-It-Is" in the May 1979 Word Ways. This article is a sequel, concentrating on women's and men's clothing stores, including such specialties as maternity and bridal shops, but excluding shoes (more often dominated by large chains). The names in both articles are an impressive testimony to the inventiveness of the human mind.

Plaudere, Du Alp!, Herbert Pfeiffer

Word Ways

Herbert Pfeiffer is the only currently-active palindromist in West Germany. The following, first published in Neue Texte (an Austrian journal for poetry) in 1983, is believed to be the longest German palindrome ever written. Readers familiar with long English-language palindromes know that they make local sense but shift subject in erratic and unpredictable ways; so it is with "Talk, Nightmare!". The literal translation utterly destroys the spirit of the German original, becoming mere gibberish. I have attempted a free translation of the beginning and end which, I think, conveys the author's desolate message if not his exact words.

Shakespearean Word (514) Ways (82), Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

In 1969, The Bard met The Computer, resulting in The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare by marvin Spevack, a 1600-page book with very large pages and very small type, cataloguing the 884,647 words of Will's written corpus, from A to ZWAGGER'D. Excepting the 43 most frequently used words (THE, AND, I, etc.), every single use of every single word is listed, with the line or context in which it appears. The number of times each word is used is also tabulated. I do not doubt this revolutionized the study of Shakespeare, but I am not aware of a logological appreciation.

Kickshaws, Eric Albert

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Colloquy

Word Ways

Responses to previously published articles.

A Rude Word In The Alphabet Soup, Don Laycock

Word Ways

Horace Greerly looked at his spoon first in amazement, then in a mixture of disbelief and horror.

"Martha," he said finally. "There's a rude word in my alphabet soup."

Formal Analogy Is Best, John Henrick

Word Ways

Like graffiti and proverbs, bumper sticker slogans invite compilation and classification. The taxonomist thus occupied soon concludes that occasional specimens appear sui generis. more careful thought, however, leads to the realization that in certain cases, at least, the peculiar instance provides the template for a genre.

Oxonian Wordplay, David Shulman

Word Ways

The Oxford University Press, publisher of the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary and its current Supplement, issued in 1984 The Oxford Guide to Word Games by Tony Augarde, a member of their dictionary staff. This 250-page book is a fascinating guide to all sorts of wordplay and word games, their origins, rules and variations. Included are acrostics, crosswords, rebuses, anagrams, tongue-twisters, and popular games such as Scrabble. However, since the author is a lexicographer rather than a logologist, the reader will search in vain for original material; Augarde has merely repeated whatever he encountered in his bibliography. Alas, this is skimpy; …

Dutch Crow-Eggs (Kraaieeieren), George J. Levenbach

Word Ways

This article is a translation of material appearing on pages 108. 110 and 113 of Opperlandse Taal- & Letterkunde, the Dutch book of wordplay reviewed in teh February 1985 Word Ways. One of the outstanding features of Dutch is its ability to form words with large numbers of consecutive vowels; here this ability is stretched to the limit.

Sound-Spelling Correspondences, Mark Isaak

Word Ways

The introduction to the American Heritage Dictionary contains a list showing the variety of spellings which give particular sounds. Although it gives most of the common spellings, it omits many others. This list is an attempt to fill in the gaps.

A Fascinating Index (Non-Papal Kind), Louis Phillips

Word Ways

The following piece of found humor is taken from the index to Fred Allen's Much Ado About Me. Can anyone conceive of a stranger collection of topics?

Dipthongs, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

A vowel, by definition, is a sound produced by the vibrations of the vocal cords without the friction or stoppage which characterizes consonants. The alphabetical vowels are A, E, I, O, and U, comprising about 40 percent of the letters in all written words. Actually, A and I are dipthongs; one vowel sound immediately followed by another I is pronounced ah-ee.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of the issue, including instructions to authors.

A Logo-Trivia Quiz, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

It had to happen. The recent trivia craze sweeping the nation has finally invaded the sacred precincts of logology. here, then, is the first full-fledged logolgoical trivial quiz. It happens to be one placing the beginner on a par with the expert: so far as I know, none of the items included have previously appeared in Word Ways, my books, or anywhere else. Have fun!

Fragging The Froggies, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

What's wrong with pay TV, jet, jingle, discount and such words? Plenty, says the French government. They represent the invasion of pure French by Franglais, as do long-established words from English such as smoking and weekend. M. Mitterand's government now wants to fine Frenchmen the equivalent of seven dollars each time one of these words is used; it has legally banned some 126 of them in all. Sacre bleu! Howard Smith suggests we retaliate by weeding out of English such French words as lassez-faire and café and such expressions as c'est la vie ("tough titty"). He would replace raconteur …

Phobia And Counterphobia, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

Two wrongs are rumored to make things right, but do two phobias cancel each other out? For example, if a claustrophobe (one who fears closed spaces) were to become agoraphobic (fear of open spaces), would he be cured? Or would he simply have no place to go? Perhaps this is a fool's question, but the point is that a lot of phobias have direct opposites. (Not all phobias, however, have a counterpart. Many of us have ballistophobia - fear of being shot, but do you know anyone with a fear of not being shot?)

Long Isograms (Part 1), Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

One of the aesthetic delights available to logologists is contemplating isograms: words, names, and other verbal entitites in which each of the alphabetic letters used appears the same specified number of times. PSEUDOMYTHICAL, for instance, is a solo isogram, using each of 14 different letters once; HAPPENCHANCE is a pair isogram, using each of 6 different letters twice; and SESTETTES is a trio isogram, using each of 3 different letters three times. In a cryptographic context, solo isograms are known as nonpattern terms; in a pangrammatic setting, as partial pangrams. Beyond trio isograms lie hitherto unexplored higher orders -- tetrad, …

Two-Letter Interjections, Philip L. Pollack

Word Ways

It is a curious fact that a substantial percentage of two-letter words are interjections; of the 227 words in the "Dictionary of Two-Letter Words" issued by the Biliteral Society and reviewed below, grouping interjections according to feelings, commands and statements, show the great variety of messages that can be sent.

Welsh: Reversed English!, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

In the February 1984 issue of Word Ways, Canadian Jay Ames presented a list of 121 English words which also happen to be Czech words - though their meanings in Czech are unrelated to those in English. Of these 121 words, 54 were words of 2 or 3 letters, too short to be really interesting. That left 67 worthwhile specimens of the genre under consideration.

To Act Or Not To Act, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

"To be, or not to be" was the question troubling Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. A somewhat analogous question troubling me has been whether "to act, or not to act." Torn by indecision, I finally decided to entrust the verdict to proverbial wisdom - to the accumulated experience of millions of human beings over a span of centuries.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

An Alien Lexicon, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Since the end of the Second World War, both laymen and scientists have given a great deal of thought to the possibility, or probability, of intelligent life elsewhere than on the earth - on other planets off the solar system, in other star systems of the Milky Way galaxy, and in other galaxies scattered through the physical universe. As a consequence, a large and varied vocabulary of terms designating different kinds of otherworldly beings has come into use.