Digital Commons Network^™

Changing Fashions In Names For Boys, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

This article on the changing popularity of male names since 1880 is based on Popular Baby Names, the Social Security Administration database described in the preceeding article. Details on the layout of the following table can be found there. In general, male names are far less subject to fashion than female names, often persisting for decades.

Pseudo-Plurals Vs. Quasi-Pseudo-Plurals, T. A. Hall

Word Ways

Imagine a pair of singular nouns A and B in which B but not A contains a letter at its right edge correspondign to the letter used to express plurality. If A and B are otherwise orthographically identical, I refer to the latter as the pseudo-plural of the former. Pseudo-plurals are very different from pseudo-comparatives. The reason is that triplets like these do not consistently belong to the same word class. By contrast, the words A and B described above most both be (singular) nouns. For reasons that will be clear below, I consider first the nature of pseudo-plurals in …

Fecund Phonetics, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The same letter, or group of letters, can have different pronunciations and hence be represented by different phonetic symbols. This is demonstrated in Unusual Words and Arbitrary Words. Conversely, the same phonetic symbol can represent different letters or groups of letters. For example, both the E and I in PHONETIST are pronounced as is the I in PIT. A phonetist is a person versed in phonetics. Each of the words below has more than one identical phonetic symbol represented by a different letter or group of letters. The phonetic symbol is given first, together with the different letter/letter groups …

More Spoonerism Riddles, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Charmed by Will Shortz's collection, in the last Word Ways, of original riddles based on spoonerisms, I whacked my writs to come up with a durther fuzzin' examples, and beer's the hunch.

More On Pseudoantonyms, T. A. Hall

Word Ways

In an article in the last issue of this journal, Anil uncovered a number of examples of pseudoantonyms in the realm of English negatory prefixes. A pseudoantonym consists of an affixed word and the corresponding unaffixed base which one would expect to be antonyms on the basis of the meaning of the affix, but which are instead synonyms (or near synonyms). For example, the prefix DE- has a primary meaning "to do the opposite of" in examples such as ACTIVATE ~ DEACTIVATE, but not in FEND DEFEND. Since the latter two words can be synonymous, they are pseudoantonyms.

Digitalised Numerical Tautonyms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Numerical Tautonyms include words such as CRE.ATE, in which the alphabetical numerical total of the first half of the word is equal to that of the second half of the word.

No No No (No, Nay, Never....), Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

We are cautioned in grade school to avoid use of the double negative -- that logically, the 2 negatives cancel out, and if that is not the intention of the writer, confusion rules. But multiple negatives do abound, and not merely for emphasis as is "No, no a thousand times no...."

Hot-Pad: A New Puzzle-Game, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

The Puzzle: The twelve tokens are to be placed on the playing board so that each triangle contains, on its nodes, a transposal of HOT-PAD. On the back cover is a large copy of the playing grid. Another way of looking at the puzzle is to note that the tokens on any two nodes adjoined by a line have no letter in common.

Phonetic Vowel Rotations, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Phonetic Vowel Rotations is offered as a new twist on vowel rotations, a genre familiar to the readers of Word Ways. LAST LEST LIST LOST LUST is a vowel rotation. The embedded 5 major vowels 'rotate' in the same position in the word, the other letters also remaining in their positions.

Doublets, Dana Richards

Word Ways

A selection from Richards' book Victorian Enigmas and Sherlockian Puzzles.

Crossword Finishers, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Over the years, a number of books have been published to aid the crossword solver faced with a word having one or two letters filled in. Such books can become prohibitively large, depending on the number of letters in the partially-solved word.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles in this issue.

Punk Whiz 14: State Of The Pun, A. Anil

Word Ways

In this mostly easy pun quiz all the answers are states or provinces of the US, Canada or Australia. (4|4) means the answer is a charade of the state's name whose two parts are hints -- homophonic puns of words or phrases that are not necessarily 4 and 4 letters. Answers are out back.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of the issue.

A Cryptic Puzzle From The London Times, Dana Richards

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle.

Homage To The Biliteral Society, Dave Morice

Word Ways

"Two cheers for the Biliteral Society!" I said after reading about its Dictionary of Two-Letter Words in the August 1984 issue of Word Ways. At last an official organization has recognized the importance of words that have a beginning and an end, but no middle to confuse things. In honor of the society's duplicity, I wrote a poem inspired by the diatomic nature of first-and-last-letter-only words.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 44 Number 1

Word Ways

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

My Fifteen Minutes Of Fame, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes (Andy Warhol, 1968)

Not world-famous, and for less than ten minutes ... but on December 12 2010 I saw myself portrayed by a professional actor to an audience of 35 on an off-Broadway (Jersey City) stage. The 90-minute one-act play, "Logomaniacs" bu Paul Fleischman, consisted of short sketches of 26 wordplay notables, one for each letter of the alphabet, from Walter Abish who wrote Alphabetical Africa ("Ages ago, Alex, Allan and Alva arrived at Antibes...") to Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, including Howard Chace who invented Anguish Languish ("Ladle …

A Backdoor Approach To Lipograms, A. Anil

Word Ways

How many letters can be excluded and still produce a recognizable lipogram of Mary's Lamb? For starters, excluding five letters jkqxz has no effect as they're absent in the original. Excluding five more letters bfpvy had a minimal effect, as see here (substitute words underlined).

Colloquy

Word Ways

Responses to previously published articles.

Resolving The Riddle: Plan Bee, Jim Puder

Word Ways

The discovery by Ronnie B. Kon, which he reported in the Nov. 2010 Word Ways, of an earlier, different version of Faith Eckler's refractory "1831" riddle constitutes a breakthrough, I believe, in the decades-old effort to deduce a convincing answer to this stumper. Whereas before, this riddle had seemed (to me, at least) to be intractably baffling, now, suddenly, a satisactorily suasive solution to it is discernable.

From Trash To Ashtray, Solomon W. Golomb

Word Ways

Standard "pig Latin" transforms an English word by relocating all consonant sounds (if any) before the first vowel from the beginning to the end of the word, and then appending the sound to -ay. Examples include: run to unray; black to ackblay, mice to icemay, and act to actay. Pig Latin is intended to modify spoken English, so it should operate on pronunciations, not spellings. Thus: gem to emjay (or M.J.), hour to ouray, and wide to I'd weigh. Of special interest are words that become new English words or expressions in …

A Lot Of Hot Air, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

A lot of hot air has been generated in an attempt to solve the riddle first proposed in Word Ways in 1981. I believe that Ronnie Kon has unwittingly given us the clue that will reveal the riddle's answer. He notes that it first appeared in Dickson's Balloon Almanac in 1801, and we need to discover what kind of publication that was.

A Poem, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

"Bedtime"

Word Rings From Rearranged Alphabets, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

On page wu (wort-uiteinden) of Opperlauns! taal- & letterkunde (Querido, 2003), Battus (pseudonym of Hugo Brandt Corstius) constructed lists of 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-letter Dutch words in which the end of one word was the start of the next: for example, query, yapok, knoop, ... zamac, clash. Each letter of the Dutch alphabet was used once in a word-join. By rearranging the alphabet to accommodate rare starts and endings, Battus created strings using every letter.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute.

"A Word Of Difference", J. James Mancuso

Word Ways

A selection of some neologisms for publication in Word Ways: starting with letters C through E, submitted on 2 Nov 2010.

Cipher Wheels For Cheerfuller Hallmarking, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Cipher wheels are a well-known method of cryptography. Their embodiments range from the Jefferson wheel, invented by the American President Thomas Jefferson, to the Enigma machine, whose solution was critical to the course of World War II. Not surprisingly, cipher wheels are related to several basic topics in wordplay. These topics include non-crashing word sets, shiftwords, collinear words, halfway words and reflectors.

Anagram Quiz, A. Anil

Word Ways

The clues are definitive anagrams or polyanagrams of the answers. Most are reversible anagrams from up/dn and Word Ways here given in reverse order. Reversible anagrams are pairs that work either way, eg, pat=tap = tap=pat. To be definitions of each other they should be grammatically compatible, as most here are. Answers are out back.

Dogging The Wag: More Amusing Bloopers And Puckish Retorts, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Last fall, a weekly e-zine published by someone I know -- I'll omit identifying information here -- ran me this announcement:

"Novelist Ford Madox Ford once said that you can 'open the book to page 99 and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.' He's now putting his idea to the test by launching http://www.page99test.com in a few weeks. This new site will allow any authors (or aspiring authors) to upload the 99th page of their books and allow readers to comment on whether they would buy or like to read the rest of their books."

Does …