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Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Same Name Game, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Have you ever observed that certain celebrities, historical figures, and other famous individuals happen ot share identical -- or very similar -- first and last names? For example, PAUL SIMON is the pop singer-composer, while another PAUL SIMON is the bow-tied former Illinois Senator. (Appearing with the Senator on CNN in 1995, comic Richard Belzer joked: "I have all his albums.")

The Oz Contradictionary: Part 5

Word Ways

This is an excerpt from a 98-page book, up/dn, a dictionary and contradictionary of wordplay including anagrams, palindromes and charades, privately published in 1999 by a retired Australian (Oz) biologist (see February 2001 Word Ways for details).

Palindrome Park, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

Palindrome Park is a very special place. It was established by billionaire nature-lover and palindrome fanatic Otto Markram at his retreat near Tassessat in the remote Air Mountains of Morocco. This unique botanical and zoological park has only 26 enclosures, each housing a different palindromic specimen. Some may surprise you - there are plants, animals, birds, fish, insects, and even a mythical creature!

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Onomastic Anomaly: New South Wales, Thomas I. Bernard

Word Ways

I have always been intrigued with the toponymic anomaly of the name of the Australian state of New South Wales. Obviously there are countless examples of toponyms that are preceded by the adjective New; these are, or were, usually in honor or remembrance of countries (New England, New Spain, New France, New Mexico, New Guinea, etc.) or cities (New York, New Orleans, New Rochelle, New London, New Paltz, etc.) . Clearly such names arose in response to newly settled or newly discovered places, but there are other reasons when New might have been used.

Noah's Consonants, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The title refers to he of the Ark as distinct from he of the dictionary. Noah's Ark is a honeymoon haven for words because Noah only admits those words in which each consonant has a partner. In practice he's even more picky, refusing entry to any such words with less than 3 different consonants (6 consonants in total). He also turns away hyphenated examples, phrases, coinages, palindromes, tautonyms and pair isograms. Here, we attempt to discover some of those words which have made it past Noah into the Ark.

Living Ten-Squares, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

"A New Approach to the Ten Square" in the February 2002 Word Ways unsuccessfully sought to construct a ten-square out of names such as Elmer Davis or James Smith, all belonging to living United States residents or deceased Social Security beneficiaries. Steve Root suggested that present-day computer power permits a more ambitious program: instead of processing independent 5X5 chunks of first and last names, why not construct full ten-squares consisting of names of all lengths.

Jesuit-Ignatius Palindromes, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Inigo de Onez y Loyola, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), is famed as the founder of the Jesuit order of Roman Catholic clergy. The logologically noteworthy coincidence that the last four letters of "Ignatius" are the reversal of the last four letters of "Jesuit" or long challenged palindromists to devise some reasonably artistic palindromic passage that unites the two names. To date, a fully satisfactory formulation has proven to be frustratingly elusive. In I love Me, Vol. I, for example, Michael Donner offers "An Ignatius ejaculation's... [no ital! u.c.!] ... A JESUIT AGNINA!" and variations, and "Set, a Luca Jesuit …

Matched Terminal Deletions, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In Kickshaws of Feb 2002, Dave Morice asked for words beginning and ending in the same letter, which revealed other words (say, core words) when the terminal letters were discarded. He asked for the longest source words beginning with each letter of the alphabet, in each of four categories: the revealed word reads forwards; reads backwards; reads a different word forwards from backwards (called "both" below, his example was STARS - TAR + RAT); and reads the same backwards and forwards (palindrome).

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Inconsonant Bigrams

Word Ways

Inconsonant Bigrams is what i call another wordplay form I've dabbled in, probably not original, that makes sentences out of bigrams in which the vowel and its position are constant and only the consonants are inconstant. This is sort of the inverse of Vowel Movements in the February 1998 Kickshaws, as well as "Vowel Cascades, Vowel Movements and Di-Odes" in the February 2002 Word Ways. (Perhaps a better name for Inconsonant Bigrams would be Consonant Movements.) Is there an official name for this?

How To Pack Months, Presidents And States, David S. Robinson

Word Ways

In the May 2001 issue of Word Ways, Ross Eckler showed how one could exhibit the names of the nine planets, each one in order, in only 26 letters: MNVESARCPJLUPITHURYOANUSER. In the August issue, Darryl Francis followed this up with letter chains of 19 and 23, respectively, containing the days of the week and the colors of the rainbow.

Eva: Palindromic Chaos In A Cave, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

The dangers attendant on speleology have perhaps not been sufficiently emphasized. In one particularly gruesome incident, a spelunker dived into a cave pool, passed unawares through a subterranean passage, and emerged from the pool into an enclosed grotto. Being unable to find his way back with the pool disguising his whereabouts from the search party, he starved to death in the darkness.

Foldedness Factor In Letter Arrays, James Puder

Word Ways

An idle diversion with pencil and graph paper involves writing some ordered sequence of letters in the cells of a grid and searching the horizontal, vertical and diagonal rows of the resulting array for accidentally-formed new words. Since there is usually a multiplicity of possible ways to inscribe a given letter string into a grid, the question arises as to whether some inscription patterns are likely to be more productive of new words than others. Logic suggests that the answer is yes. Because any new words in the array must form along straight lines, and because no answer is yes. …

Dude, Not One Dud!, Win Emmons

Word Ways

Xxxx, X xxxx xxx I tell actor Lancaster that I'm ready for a massage

Xxxxxx xx Xxxxx'x xxxxx xxx? I muse: has George Bush's chief of staff been discharged?

C Can Cause Cancer, William Gillespie

Word Ways

epidemiological scientific research confirms

curious doctors' uncertain suspicions

medical researchers announce conclusions:

c can cause cancer

Bananagrams 17, Edmund Conti

Word Ways

Bananagrams--anagrams to drive you bananas--consist of rhymed couplets, each one containing a pair of anagrams to be solved. One of the rhyming words will always be an anagrams, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve the anagram. All of the bananagrams in this article have been borrowed form the late Bill Webster's One Wordy Guy.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Issue 18, David Bell

NoteBooth

New Booth Library opens; Teachers' Center offers collections and workshops; New librarians Stacey Knight-Davis (Reference) and Sarah Nesbeltt (Reference).

Qing Pangrams, Alan G. Wagner

Word Ways

The word Qing, the name of the last Chinese dynasty (1644-1912), is frequently employed as an adjective, as in Qing porcelain. Used in a pangram, Qing has the obvious advantage of taking care of the Q while freeing up the U to be used elsewhere, resulting in 26-letter pangrams which make much better sense and use more familiar words than the ones I have seen. However, Qing does not appear as an entry in Merriam-Webster's Tenth New Collegiate (10C), Merriam-Webster's Third New International (NI3), or the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (OED). 10C does have an entry for Ching (or …

Gull-Day-Looks Enter Tree Bars, William E. Brandt

Word Ways

Wants pond term dare worsted ladle gull wit surge putty you low coils date peephole culled hire Gull-day-looks. Gully-day-looks lipped wit hire mutter inner ladle coat hedge knee rah eye bag four rest. Wine over Gull-day-looks axed oaf sheik cud gopher awoke enter bag four rest, hire mutter wood hallways sign, "Sir teen lie knot! Day bag four rest aster ding jar us, eats fouled with wee kid bars slack tweet ladle gulls."

Beyond Resolution: What Does Conflict Transformation Actually Transform?, Christopher Mitchell

Peace and Conflict Studies

The paper considers the concept of ‘conflict transformation’ in relation to earlier ideas concerning the ‘resolution’ of conflict and seeks to differentiate between the two approaches. Writers and writings from the conflict transformation ‘school’ are surveyed and an effort is made to delineate the core characteristics of the approach, viewed either as a process or an end state. Questions are raised about transformation on a personal, group or conflict system level, all of which seem to be encompassed by various adherents of the transformation school, and the unifying concept that emerges is that of the relationship between adversaries being transformed …

Genre Studies: Temporary Homogeneous Grouping To Improve Reading Or Merely Another Form Of Tracking?, Brenda Wright Campbell Edd

Dissertations

For the last fifty years, raising the achievement levels of students thought to be “at-risk” has proven to be one of the most difficult and vexing problems facing educators. Although many different strategies have been tried with varying levels of success, no single at-risk solution has emerged that both promotes significant achievement gains and helps to narrow the achievement gap between people of color and whites. This study examined the effectiveness of a particular district-wide literacy strategy in its first year that focused on literacy to educate students identified as “at-risk”. Specifically, this study used data gathered from two measures …

Antiterrorismus: The German Experience With Politically Motivated Violence, James I. Nelson

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

Bi-Consonantal Reduplication In Amharic And Ethio-Semitic, Peter Edward Unseth

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation is a study of the consonant reduplication process in Amharic, a process which is herein named “Bi-Consonantal Reduplication.” In this process, the last two consonants of a root are repeated, a process that has never been studied in a systematic way in Amharic or any other Semitic language. Previous authors have used a variety of labels for this process, too often writing their definitions in ways that include other types of reduplication or that exclude some genuine examples of this reduplication pattern. This dissertation provides a more precise definition for this process that includes all and only genuine …

Book Review: The Urban Indian Experience In America By Donald L. Fixico, Liz Grobsmith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Donald Fixico's study of urban Indians may seem at first to be a review of a well-known and well-documented period: the shift from reservation life to urban relocation as a result of the US government's deliberate assimilationist policies of the 1950s. Surely the historical attitudes regarding reservation termination and urban relocation have been amply documented in the last half century. But Fixico takes us beyond the historical realities to an in-depth look at Indian life in urban America, focusing on the variety of concerns with which these populations have had to cope: economic viability; employment and financial stability; access to …

Book Review: Âh-Âyîtaw Isi Ê-Kî-Kiskêyihtahkik Maskihkiy . They Knew Both Sides Of Medicine: Cree Tales Of Curing And Cursing. Told By Alice Ahenakew, Rory M. Larson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Linguists and students of reservation-period Indian lore should welcome this finely crafted book. The heart of the work is a series of recordings of Alice Ahenakew, a prominent elderly Plains Cree woman from northern Saskatchewan. These are the memoirs of her life, lived in a haunted half-way world between a subarctic foraging culture and the twentieth- century industrial West.

Mending The Sacred Hoop: Identity Enactment And The Occupation Of Wounded Knee, Sheryl L. Lindsley, Charles Braithwaite, Kristin L. Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This account by Oglala holy man Black Elk of the 1890 US cavalry massacre of three hundred Sioux Indians, mainly women and children, helps us understand the rhetorical importance of the American Indian Movement's return to Wounded Knee eighty-three years later. The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by the leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) represented a culmination of frustration felt by Native Americans. Magazines as diverse as Time and National Review reported the incident as a staged "pseudo-event" designed to amplify the oppressor/oppressed relationship. News coverage of Wounded Knee included headlines of mockery: "Of Fallen …

Case Studies Of Deviant Creative Individuals And Their Major Life Achievements, Allison M. Rusin

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

writing.