Digital Commons Network^™

Alphanumerically Truthful Equations

Word Ways

Susan Thorpe's pioneering excursion into alphanumeric arithmetic (WW '04-78) inspired me to look at the flip side of the coin and explore the alphanumerics of verbal equations. This involves adding up the numerical values of their letters using A=1 thru Z=26.* I began with the anagram ELEVEN + TWO = TWELVE + ONE reported by Melvin O. Wellman in the April '48 issue of The Enigma, journal of the National Puzzlers League. This often regarded as the most perfect of all English anagrams. I reported several numero-logological coincidences regarding it in WW '02-308. I now report five more remarkable coincidences: …

Fabulous Creatures, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The collection has been compiled from over five hundred different sources, and contains a large number of weird and wonderful creatures, many not listed in standard references. For your enjoyment, here are some examples, one of each letter of the alphabet.

Counting With Your Fingers, Eric Iverson

Word Ways

Assuming that the thumb is your first finger, the index finger your second, and so on to the pinkie your fifth, here are the words in which each character typed on a qwerty typewriter keyboard by your nth finger appears precisely n times in the word.

The Campkin Poem, Ove Michaelsen

Word Ways

This poem, submitted by Henry Campkin to the March 8, 1873 British journal Notes and Queries, is somewhat nonsensical. It was written to please a group of youthful folk, and to show that the English tongue is as capable of being twisted into "uncouth shapes" as Latin. The terrible limp in the meter is unavoidable because one line of each couplet is largely palindromic.

Webster's Third Book Of Records, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The Guinness Book of Records has cataloged the world's extremes for nearly 50 years. First appearing in Britain in 1955 and the US in 1956, this book has listed the highest, the lowest, the hottest, the coldest, the longest, the smallest and so on, from a wide range of natural phenomena and human endeavors.

Denser Yet, And Yet Less Dense, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article concerns words of high and low density, ie a large sum with respect to the number of letters. A recent effort by Susan Thorpe (Lighter and Heavier, Word Ways, August 2003), also details previous work. She (deliberately, one supposes) omitted words, variously sanctioned by the OED and the Palindromicon, of length 5 or more, consisting solely of a repeated letter: I follow her in not using about 24 examples of repeated letters A, X, and Z.

The Eleven-Square - Take One, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

At the end of my article "Hunting the Ten-Square" (May 2004 Word Ways) I said that about one million 11-letter words might suffice to have a 50-50 chance of finding a square. I have since conducted some more investigations using both formula and programs, and conclude that more than two million words are needed to obtain a reasonable selection of squares.

English Loanwords In Japanese Tv Ads, Richard R.P. Gabbrielli

Word Ways

Historically speaking, linguistic borrowing is a common phenomenon in the evolution of a language. However, unlike countries where English was adopted as an institutional variety as a result of linguistic legacy, the English found in Japan - specifically in television advertising - is a particularly intriguing linguistic puzzle. Although most of the English one sees on products and garments is often incomprehensible, pointless, or simply rude, advertisers/copy writers do have the power to manipulate the English language and 'engineer' changes to satisfy their own utilitarian purposes.

Can Math Limericks Survive?, Will Nediger

Word Ways

This famous mathematical limerick by Leigh Mercer appeared in the February 1980 Word Ways.

The Creatures Of English Idioms, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Animals and birds, even lower forms of life, appear significantly in the traditional and often colorful idioms of English which teach the wisdom of the folk. Are you wise enough to provide the correct expression - and, if necessary, the name of the creature involved in each of these cases.

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.

Deafdigest: Blue Edition, August 1, 2004, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Blue 2004

No abstract provided.

Transposing One Genre Into Another, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The letter pattern of some word genres is only a whisker away from the letter pattern of other word genres. My current objective is to change a word of one genre into a word of another genre by swapping the positions of just TWO of its letters. By this means, some tautonyms with the letter pattern 1212 (TOTO) make palindromes with the letter patterns 2112 and 1221 (OTTO and TOOT) simply by swapping the positions of the first 2 letters, or last 2 letters, respectively.

Numerical Palindromes: The Next Generation, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Several types of numerical palindromes have appeared in Word Ways (Susan Thorpe, Numerical Palindromes: Part 1 in Nov 1996 and Rex Gooch, Numerical Palindromes: Part 2 in Feb 1997). However, I believe the current exercise is the first to make two or more numerically-palindromic 'offspring' from the letters of a numerically-palindromic 'parent'. In other words, numerical palindromes beget numerical palindromes.

Teachers’ Career Decisions In A Cognitive Framework: Logistical Regression Analysis Of A National Data Set, Tamara H. Rosier

Dissertations

Research was conducted in order to determine if extrinsic, cognitive or situative sets of variables could predict teachers' career decisions using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). Questions from the survey were divided into three cognitive perspectives: extrinsic, cognitive, and situative. Stepwise logistic regression analyses were used to predict group membership among those who chose to stay in their current position and those who left the profession.

Results for the extrinsic set of variables indicated that while the model was a good fit, the ability of the model to predict was low. Teachers agreeing that student behavior interferes with ability …

Auge2004, Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly Manuscripts

From August 2004 Robert Kelly Archive.

Alaskan Caver, Volume 24, No. 4, October 2004, Carlene Allred

Alaskan Caver

Contents: Karst Inventory Performed On Kosciusko Island And Prince Of Wales Island By The Tongass Cave Project, August 19-25, 2003 - Zina Cave Report, By Pete Smith And Kevin Allred - Zina Cave Map, Plan View Of Southwest Portion - Zina Cave Map, Profile View Of Southwest Portion - Zina Cave Map, Plan And Profile Of Northern Portion - Dave’s Den, Report And Map By Kevin Allred - Cave Rescue Seminar, By Bruce White - Island Hopping To A New World, By Alex Markels - Who’s Who In Alaskan Caving, By Bruce White - Letter To The Editor - Rope …

Beguiling Beginnings And Dialectical Salvaging : The Presidential Inaugural Speech And African-American Leaders' Speeches., Jacqueline Elaine Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how presidential inaugural speeches reflect the overarching mindset of the government, and how, in the postmodern era, this mindset manifests the same sort of African American erasure that has existed since Middle Passage. In addition, I explore the rhetorical engagement black leaders use to respond to, prevent, or to circumvent this erasure. This dissertation examines presidential inaugural speeches, during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, from the Kennedy administration to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to prove that, most times, this type of speech is little more than epideictic formality in regards to black interests, and, perhaps, …

Interlanguage Lexicology Of Arab Students Of English A Computer Learner Corpus-Based Approach, Mousa Abdelghani Al-Btoosh

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Since the very early emergence of machine-readable corpora into the linguistics scene in the 1960s, the direction of a considerable body of linguistic research began to shift from syntax and phonology, the, by then, focus of linguistic research, to a number of domains that remained mostly neglected under the umbrella of traditional approaches. Fortunately, lexicology, the target of this research, was a major beneficiary of that dramatic shift. By employing a computer learner corpus-based approach, this study addresses multidimensional lexical aspects of a machine-readable corpus of the writing of Arab students of English as a foreign language. Lexical investigation of …

News You Can Use, University Of Texas At Arlington Library

News You Can Use

No abstract provided.

Speech/Language And Social Behavior Performance As Predictors Of Literacy Acquisition In Children With Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Fetal Alcohol Effects, Kristen Ann Runge

Theses and Dissertations

This study was a review of existing case files and focused on the struggles of one particular segment of the special needs student population and the challenges that educators face as they attempt to engage them in meaningful learning experiences. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Fetal Alcohol Effects (FAS/FAE) are completely preventable; yet, their presence in classrooms remains high and bears profound implications for educators. This study examined the specific relationships between FAS/FAE and literacy acquisition in children. Specific variables of children with FAS/FAE were considered. They included IQ, speech/language development, and social behavior performance.

Hypotheses guiding this study were the following:

1. Evidence …

Relation Between Children's Attachment Representations And Secure Base Behavior, Patricia S. Barrig Jo

Open Access Theses

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that there is a relation between preschool children's forming attachment representations and the organization of their secure base behavior. Subjects were recruited from Greater Lafayette, Indiana. Participants were 50 children 36 to 67 months of age. Each child was presented an attachment story completion task to make up stories regarding attachment events. In addition, information about their secure base behavior was collected through live observation at home and park. Attachment representations were assessed on the extent of scriptedness and elaboration of the secure base phenomenon shown in the stories. A …

Informe Preliminar Del Trabajo, 2004, John H. Walker

ProSIGAB Documents

No abstract provided.

Native Language And Non-Linguistic Influences On The Production Of English Vowels By Speakers Of Korean: An Acoustic Study, Ji-Eun Kim

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study investigates the production of Korean and English front vowels by ninety-one Koreans, based on their arrival age to the U.S., length of residence in the U.S. and degree of motivation. Subjects' Korean and English productions were analyzed by measuring F1, F2 and duration. Additionally, this study observed other phonological and phonetic features, such as the number of front vowel categories, the distance between the highest and lowest front vowels (Korean /i/~/?/ and English /i/~/æ/), the distance between the lowest two vowels (Korean /e/~/?/ and English /?/~/æ/) and the lengthening effects based on the voicing of the following consonants. …

Aspects Of The Kam Language, As Revealed In Its Narrative Discourse, Tongyin Yang

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Discourse analysis has long been understudied in Kam. This research aims to initiate the exploration of this new field by examining various aspects of Kam narrative discourse and reveal its structural properties through a functional approach within Schiffrin's discourse model. A newfound morpheme /e/ leads to discussion of phonological and syntactic variations from discourse perspective. The reduction of components in rhymes in directional verbs is related to not only semantic manifestation, but more importantly, to the building-up of narrative discourse. The classifier variants in the types CLSa and CLSb encode number difference, though not identical to numbers in Indo-European languages. …

Mothers Of Us All: When Does Political Message Take Precedence Over Art In Some Modern And Contemporary Women’S Poetry, Shanda Hansma Blue Easterday

Dissertations

This dissertation contains an essay with the above title, as well as two sections of poems. The first section of poems is entitled Maria Sibylla Merian, Artist and Naturalist , and is a collection of poems about, and in the voice of, Merian. Many of these are what are known as personna poems. The second section of poems is entitled The Beekeeper's Wife , and uses autobiography as a framework for communicating the humor in human relationships, and for illustrating the surrealism in the human race's relationships with the natural world.

My research for my essay entailed the study of …

Constructions Of Female Identities In Mary Gordon's The Other Side And Maureen Howard's Before My Time, Neli Gogovska

Theses and Dissertations

In Women's Time Kristeva designates three broad currents of feminist struggle: first, the suffragist movement declaring a universalist view of women's experience regardless of class, age, and cultures; second, the phase of difference, that she regards as "returning to an archaic (mythic) memory as well as cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements" (355); and third, a trend that she wholeheartedly supports for their concept that "the dichotomy of man and woman as an opposition of two rival entities is a problem of metaphysics" (366).

This thesis discusses Howard and Gordon as proponents of the second phase because they write …

Role Of Naming In Stimulus Categorization By Preschool Children, Caio Flavio Miguel

Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to assess whether children would categorize pictures when taught the relevant listener and speaker behaviors separately. A category-sort test was used to assess emergent conditional relations. Category-sort trials consisted of looking at (Test 1) or tacting/labeling (Test 2) a samplestimulus and selecting the appropriate comparison stimuli. In Experiment 1, 4 children (3- 5 years) were taught to tact pictures of six U.S. state maps as either north or south. An assessment was conducted to determine whether they would (1) correctly categorize or sort when presented with a visual sample and (2) select the …

Love, Laughter, And Lessons: What A Canine Brought To A Classroom For Students With Severe Emotional Disorders, Katherine L. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine whether having a dog as a member of a self-contained classroom for students diagnosed with severe emotional disorders held benefits for these students. This study provided an opportunity to explain or predict the effects that a dog had on students’ emotional well-being and learning in the school setting.

The methods and procedures for this study were qualitatively collected and analyzed. This study was considered a case study, because it explored a bounded system over time through detailed, in-depth data collection, which involved observations, student interviews, and parent interviews. The broad research question …