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Pan-Crashing Word Sets, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Two words of the same length are said to crash with each other if they contain the same letter in the same position; thus, TORUS and SNOUT crash because both have the letter U in the fourth position, but GUFFAW and MAIDEN do not. FIGHT and MIGHT crash in several positions simultaneously.

Interviewing "Ronald Wilson Reagan", Howard W. Bergerson

Word Ways

As a rule, VIPs are likely to be interviewed only by other equal or lesser VIPs. But there is an even stronger rule, little known and indubitably of less consequence, that only VUPs are ever observed interviewing a Big Name in the literal sense, and like all bizarre aberrations in nature it is observed only rarely. I am not speaking of interviewing a Big Name in the figurative sense as Barbara Walters would do, which really means interviewing the actual person. No, I speak of interviewing only the Name itself, which in the present instance is composed of eleven distinct …

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover, including instructions to authors.

Creative Chronograms, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

Chronogram? What's that? A new digital watch?

Not quite. It's an intriguing form of word play, more popular several centuries ago than it is today. If you like tinkering with words and enjoy a creative challenge, then chronograms are for you. But a note of caution is in order: chronograms can be addicting.

Long Digrammatic Strings, Alan Frank

Word Ways

In 1969, Word Ways published a trigram list by Faith and Ross Eckler; based on the 5th and 7th editions of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, it gave the "most common" word for each trigram the authors could find. Since that time, Philip Cohen has greatly extended the list by mining Webster's Unabridged as well as various gazetteers and other references. For some letter-groups, such as ESS, a trigram is almost too trivial to be worth printing; but others, such as JVJ, are so hard that one would be pleased to find a word containing a bigram using two of these three …

Iambic Idiosyncrasy, Helen S. Van Ummersen

Word Ways

Word Ways readers may recall my "Potpourri" in the August 1981 Kickshaws, a poem consisting of lines from many different poets. If the following poem does not seem to make a great deal of sense, there is a very good reason; it, too, is a poetic patchwork. Can you identify the poets? (Warning: three of the lines are my own.) Identifications are given in the Answers and Solutions.

The Monosyllable Machine (Part 1), Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

A late June day's unseasonable heat caused by Southern California's own native foehn, chinook, harmattan, khamsin, sirocco, or simoom, known in the Southland as the Santa Ana wind, found me again in Dr. H. K. Wombat's cool and spacious study, The Marsupium, filled with the fragrance of strawberries as the maestro and I sipped enormous milk shakes prepared by the furry savant's elegant and enigmatic housekeeper.

Undominated Alphabetic Sequences, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In past Word Ways articles, various authors have explored words which contain consecutive letters of the alphabet (1) in order and adjacent to each other, (2) in order but not necessarily adjacent, and (3) neither in order nor adjacent. The longer the consecutive-letter sequence that can be found in a word, the more noteworthy it is; for example, oveRSTUffed is clearly more interesting to the logologist than fiRST. I define alphabetic sequence as undominated if a word can be found containing all the letters in that sequence, but no word can be found containing any longer sequence including all the …

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.

The Highest-Scoring Scrabble Game, Kyle Corbin

Word Ways

What is the highest possible score achievable in a SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game (hereafter referred to simply as a Scrabble game)? This question has intrigued Word Ways readers for ten years.

Epic Error Recipe, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The following palindromic trialogue was initially inspired by J.A. Lindon's classic 'In Eden, I' which appeared in the November 1970 issue of Word Ways.

Naomi, I Moan, Chaim Fleischman

Word Ways

In this quiz the answer to each clue is a palindrome; to aid in the solution, word-divisions and all vowels are given. The first letters of all thirteen palindromes will spell out another palindrome when read from top to bottom. Answers are given in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

Emesis Nemesis: Naming Butterflies, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Emesis nemesis: a pretty word symmetry, suggesting the name of a nostrum to prevent vomiting. It is, instead, the Latin name of a little Texas butterfly. H.L. Lewis's Butterflies of the World boasts color photographs of more than 5,000 of the lovely creatures. Most of the book does consist of these color plates, and at the bottom of each page are the scientific (genus and species) names. The Latin words encountered form a fitting counterpoint to the fascination of the photographs. If a living being happens to belong to a notorious genus, that name appears as a bold entry in …

Rubberneck: An Overlooked Word, Giles Zimmer

Word Ways

Often when children are exposed to a word for the first time, the instance of its use is so vivid that the word is indelibly impressed upon the memory. There are many words which, though no longer used today, I still remember because of experiences associated with the words. This is true for the word "rubberneck". I remember, as a child, how I used to lift up the phone receiver, only to hear the familiar accusation of "rubberneck, rubberneck". This was a fairly common experience for me and, I am sure, for many others who inadvertently blundered into a conversation …

-Omancy Fancy: A Divination Guide, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

In Gregory Benford's novel, In the Ocean of Night, one of the characters asks her husband for the daily horoscope. The husband, apparently bored with the daily horoscope routine, offers to "nip out for a small goat, put him to the knife and give ... a prognosis". Such, he believes, is a more gutsy form of fortune-telling. Ineed.

Every Tom, Dick And Harry, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

Here, from the world of sports, jazz musicians, policemen, shoe salesmen and the general public who create the lively slanguage of Americans, are some easy and some not-so-easy "characters" for you to identify. If you get most of them, consider yourself to be something of an expert on slang in the land of Uncle Sam. We all know that levis come from the jeans manufactured by the Levi Strauss Company. What is the meaning of each of the following slang terms involving proper names? Answers will be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

A Friendly Alphabet, Alan Frank

Word Ways

In a recent communication, the editor suggested to me that the standard alphabet isn't very friendly; adjacent letters don't get along well. For example, there is no word in NI containing all four of the letters WXYZ. I have found a way to rearrange the alphabet so that any group of six adjacent letters can be found in a word. THe procedure was two-fold: select a group of long words which contain several uncommon letters which may then be bunched together in the final alphabet, and then use common sense to link them together with vowels and other common letters. …

Deletions, But No Change In Meaning, William Sunners

Word Ways

While teaching school in bygone years, I frequently constructed educational word games based on Dmitri Borgmann's entertaining column, Word Row, appearing in Books Magazine (1966) and the Puzzle Lovers Newspaper (1968-71). One of his columns discussed Kangaroo Words: words concealed or contained in longer, synonymous words. For example, NURSED appears correctly spelled out in NoURiShED, and FACE is a shorter version of FACadE; many more were exhibited in Language on Vacation and a long list was developed by Tom PUlliam in the May 1976 issue of Word Ways.

Loud Screams, Jezebel Q. Xixx

Word Ways

The November 1973 issue of Word Ways included an interesting article about the wordplay of James Thurber. The article cited an observation made by Thurber that a startling affinity or antipathy exists between the letters C and M, when those letters occur as the first letters of words or names. Examples mentioned in the article included CAT and MOUSE, MALICE and CHARITY, and CHAMBERLAIN and MUNICH.

Kickshaws, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Compression Of English Text, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Information theorists maintain that typical English-language text is approximately 75 per cent predictable; for example, in a text-reconstruction experiment carried out by Claude Shannon, a subject presented with various incomplete sentences was able to guess the next letter correctly in 79 out of 102 attempts. However, if one attempts to retain the sense of a sentence after weeding out letters according to some predetermined rule, one cannot achieve such an extreme limit; in fact, the removal of even half the text is likely to introduce severe difficulties. Although Shannon cites an experiment in which six subjects restored an average of …

Tennessee's Sleeveless Pepperette, Robert Cass Keller

Word Ways

Shortly after Howard Bergerson resigned from the editorship of Word Ways, eh wrote to tell me of his latest logological discovery: PEPPERETTE, a word containing four of one letter, three of a second letter, two of a third letter, and one of a fourth letter. According to the 1969 Britannica Yearbook, a pepperette is "a girl who does a dance routine during an intermission at an athletic contest". Although the word fills an obvious gap, it doesn't seem to have caught on; in the intervening 12 years, I have never seen it used, nor does it appear in the 1971 …

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of this issue, including instructions to authors.

Fallacia Consequentis, Judy Tucker

Word Ways

"If you're driving into town," our dinner party hostess offered helpfully, "there's a parking lot right on the corner of my blog."

Egads! I thought later: she had said that the parking lot would be there if we chose to drive into town. But what if we decided to take the train? Would that entire concrete slab filled with cars suddenly vanish?

I never did find out because we drove to the dinner party that night. But this was the beginning of my obsession with a somewhat common case of poor construction or illogical deduction.

Ivan's Letter (Part 2), Erik Bodin

Word Ways

Exactly sixty minutes later he was back, carrying a bundle.

"Found anything?" he greeted Drummond.

"Everything," was the return.

Cornundrums, Lynn Louis Lazerson, Barbara Hunt Lazerson

Word Ways

Many English words begin with CON. These letters can be replaced by CORN without significantly altering either the pronunciation or the appearance of the words.
The answers to the following riddles require the substitution of CORN for CON in some everyday terms. In order to answer the riddles correctly, one need only be able to pretend that cornstalks engage in activities similar to those that occupy the time and attention of people.

Non-Crashing Word Sets, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In a December 1981 letter, the editor of Word Ways proposed the following challenge:

The September/October 1981 issue of Games magazine sponsored a contest to find the maximum number of four-letter mutually non-crashing words in boldface in Webster's Third (or inferred plurals of boldface). To my surprise, the winner came up with 21 words: abbe, baff, cleg, djin, eddy, frum, gnaw, huzz, isn't, jowl, Kthu, Lvov, myth, Omsk, PFCs, repp, skyr, Tchi, upgo, vild, Xtra. I'm now wondering if, with all the weird spellings in the OED, whether that dictionary might be used as a single source to equal or …

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 15 Number 1

Word Ways

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

Ivan's Letter (Part 1), Erik Bodin

Word Ways

The following cipher puzzle appeared in the May 1930 issue of The Enigma, the official publication of the National Puzzlers League. Erik Bodin offered a $10 to the first person to discover the secret message in Ivan's letter, hinting only that the letter encoded "the name of a point to be attacked, the date of the attack, and the troops involved". The cipher is unquestionably difficult; according to a brief not in the October 1930 Enigma, no one ever solved the puzzle. In the original article, the letter is presented in handwritten form; the slightly modified typewritten version given below …