Digital Commons Network^™

Contrary Cognomina, John Holgate

Word Ways

Many of our surnames have origins in the nomenclature of trades and professions. Once upon a time Smiths were smiths, Butchers were butchers and Carpenters were carpenters. Holgate, for example, derives from the common noun tollgate. Back in the eleventh century my ancestors were rewarded for collecting tolls and swelling the royal coffers with a Norman castle in Shropshire. Nowadays a profession-based patronym does not oblige its owner to continue in the cognominal business. Just as well - I have no desire to work as a toll collector on the motorway or an assessor in the Tax Office.

Signature Puns

Word Ways

In the style of "edifice Wrecks" (Bullwinkle). "Mousey Dung" (Kliban), "You rippa dese, you menna dese!", and David Morice's presidential puns in WW92-171, here's abbrev history of the western world in the form of more or less homophonic puns and phonetic charades on famous names. This style of word play is also known as Anguish Languish and is analysed by the editor in the November 1997 Word Ways (02-276).

Generalised Fibonacci Sums In Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In the November 2004 Kickshaws, Dave Morice noted that, in the word HOW, the sum of the ordinal values of H and O equaled that of W (8+15=23); and similarly for subtraction in WHO 23-8=15.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Attractive Opposites, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

Opposites attract. Opposites also attract people who love to mess around with word meanings and letters. Here's a brief logological taxonomy of 15 yin-yanging patterns.

Aerst Transposals, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

My article "Transposing Rates" in the November 1987 Word Ways has examples for 63 of the 120 possible transposals of the letters AERST. Further research has expanded the collection to 85, with many of the originals entries being improved as well. Abbreviations like ESRTA (Empire State Restaurant & Tavern Association) are excluded; however, a couple of derivatives (RTase, TASer) are listed. Names with initials, such as T.S. RAE, are omitted, as are contrived terms and purely foreign words. Due to the nature of the source (Net), some examples may be suspect.

Upwards Edge Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

The letters of certain words can be made into one of a series of geometrical forms when arranged, row by row, in the order in which they occur in the word. These forms sometimes exhibit edge words which read upwards, downwards, or both. In Edge Words (WW98274), I searched for right hand and left hand edge words which read downwards.

The "A" List, Steven Kahan

Word Ways

Each entry in the "A" list is made up of two words, names, or phrases that have at least two overlapping letters and in which each blank stands for a consonant, e.g. XAXAXAXXAX (6; 3-4) represents a six-letter word and two-part name or phrase consisting of a three-letter and a four-letter component. As asterisk denotes the word is capitalized. Since there are thirteen letters in all and only ten positions indicated, we can deduce that there is a three-letter overlap.

All-Diagonal 4-Squares With Common Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This last article in the series deals with 4-letter words, which tend to be the most common in use. In the top 87,000 words, there are 5356 of four letters, including 462 reversible words and 24 palindromic words. From these, it was possible to make 5261 squares.

Reverse Engineering, Eric Harshbarger

Word Ways

Abstract unavailable.

Word Networks On Wordlock, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Wordlock, a combination lock using words instead of numbers, were created by Todd Basche, a Silicon Valley executive. Sold by Staples for $5.98 (in blue or black) or $3.90 (in orange), it consists of five independently-rotating rings, yielding one hundred thousand different positions, any one of which the user can select. Because words are more easily remembered than numbers, he inscribed four of the rings with ten different letters each, and the fifth with nine different letters and a blank, allowing the user to pick either a four-letter or a five-letter word.

'Palindrome' Trnas-3 Deletions Revisited, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In the August 1989 Word Ways I posed the question

Three letters can be deleted from PALINDROME to leave 120 different groups.

How many of these 120 can be rearranged to form genuine words or terms?

Punk Whiz 3

Word Ways

Pun Quiz: what common phrases or words do these misdefinitions refer to? The numbers tell how many letters are in the words of the answer. But (2/4/4) means the answer is one 11-letter word made up of elements of 2, 4, 1 and 4 letters. My answers are at the back of this issue.

Kickshaws

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Reversible 6-Squares, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A reversible word square is one in which every row can be read backwards, and every column upwards. Every word must be either a reversible word such as LANRET (TERNAL in reverse) or a palindrome, which is a special kind of reversible word. In this article, the term reversible word does not include palindromes. In general, counts include valid rotations and reflections.

"Ma Is The Measure Of All Things": A Linguistic Potpourri, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

This is it: the inevitable "desk-clearing" article of miscellanea and ephemera that didn't fit elsewhere.

Wordplay In 1929, Believe It Or Not!, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Starting in the 1920s, the column "Believe It Or Not" by Robert Ripley appeared in more than one hundred newspapers by 1930. Reading this as a boy, I was fascinated by oddities such as the English lad who died of old age before his seventh birthday, the Hindu who hung head downward for three hours at a stretch, and the girl born with a single eye in the middle of her forehead. I was also beguiled by the 210-letter word coined by monastic writers in the Middle Ages to enumerate the varieties of divination using birds, oracles, the Bible, ghosts, …

Canine Capers, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Our domestic animals have given us such terms as buy a pig in a poke, let the cat out of the bag, and get one's goat. Can you (doggedly) work on the following expressions involving Man's Best Friend, some in the slang that calls a frankfurther a hot dog. Some are funny that they would make a dog laugh.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Vowel-Consonant Patterns: 10-Letter Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

This is a sequel to Vowel-Consonant Patterns which covered V-C patterns in 7-, 8-, and 9- letter words (Word Ways 2002249 and 2003038).

A Framework For Schema-Driven Relationship Discovery From Unstructured Text, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Krzysztof Kochut, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We address the issue of extracting implicit and explicit relationships between entities in biomedical text. We argue that entities seldom occur in text in their simple form and that relationships in text relate the modified, complex forms of entities with each other. We present a rule-based method for (1) extraction of such complex entities and (2) relationships between them and (3) the conversion of such relationships into RDF. Furthermore, we present results that clearly demonstrate the utility of the generated RDF in discovering knowledge from text corpora by means of locating paths composed of the extracted relationships.

Partita Italiana: Fifth Piano Sonata In One Movement, Emmanuel M. Dubois

Emmanuel Dubois Compositions

Op. 26: 1 score (vi + 21 pages) ; includes table of contents, foreword, poem "To laugh and to love much" by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

Movements:

• Part I: Entrata scherzosa
• Part II: Primavera solenne
• Part III: Festa del sole

From Opposition To Accommodation: How Rockefeller Foundation Grants Redefined Relations Between Political Theory And Social Science In The 1950s, Emily Hauptmann

Political Science Faculty Publications

I n this essay, I rely primarily on unpublished documents from the Rockefeller Foundation Archives as well as the annual reports of the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to show that rather than being in a torpor, political theory in the 1950s was a large and eclectic field, marked by contest and rapid change. I focus on the Rockefeller Foundation’s policy making for its program in Legal and Political Philosophy (LAPP), the largest grant program for political theory in the 1950s, both to see how the Foundation justified the creation of the program and how it …

Detecting Overweight Children In Primary Care: Do National Data Reflect The Typical Urban Practice?, Elena Sutu, Carlos J. Crespo, Barbara Shine, Anita Doshi, Teresa Quattrin

Community Health Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article presents a study which aims to obtain data about the feasibility of detecting risk for overweight and overweight in infants and young children seen for well-child visits based on pediatricians' standard practice, to compare these estimates with the national data, and to compare the data gathered during well-child visits with data collected during well-child visits with data obtained in preschool children seen for a sick-child visit. It was stated that earlier children started increasing in adiposity, the greater the risk for being obese as adolescents and adults with 40 percent of infants whose weight was above the 95th …

Planner, Volume 21, Number 6, November-December 2006, American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (Aicpa)

Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Usa V. Stanford

2006 Decisions

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Stanley V. Intl Brhd Electrial

2006 Decisions

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Usa V. Wilson

2006 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Usa V. Brown

2006 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania