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Kickshaws, David Morice Feb 2004

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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50 Best Canadian Placename Transpositions, Darryl Francis Feb 2004

50 Best Canadian Placename Transpositions, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

In previous issues of Word Ways, we've had extensive lists of transpositions of place names: US state names, US place names, British place names, and so on. But what about the other country in North America, Canada? Just to show it's not forgotten, here are our fifty longest (and therefore best) Canadian placename transpositions (province abbreviations in parenthesis).

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Aeiou(Y) Equations, Susan Thorpe Feb 2004

Aeiou(Y) Equations, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A survey of word Ways, from its inception in 1968 to the present day, would perhaps give the impression that its contributors have virtually exhausted the exercises centered on the vowels A,E, I, O, U (and Y). Somehow I doubted that. What I can't recall seeing (have I missed it?) is something so obvious that it could well have been overlooked. To me it is quite surprising, and so simple. If we assign A=1, B=2 through Z=26.

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Few Say So Feb 2004

Few Say So

Word Ways

Polite, agreeable remarks are often insincere, hiding an opposite meaning. Here are some homophonic antonyms illuminating these poles, a polite pole light or a sincere sin seer. The latter two homophones are from a Willard R. Espy article on "sound charades" in the May 1973 Word Ways. The last nine items below are modified from the same article.

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Back Cover Feb 2004

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Answers And Solutions Feb 2004

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Super Heavyweights (Part 2), Rex Gooch Feb 2004

Super Heavyweights (Part 2), Rex Gooch

Word Ways

In "Super Heavyweights (Part 1)" in the November 2004 issue of Word Ways, I presented words and phrases with letter sums of 355 through 501 (setting A=1, B=2, etc.). In this article, the continuous run is extended to 547, but samples are given for many numbers above this (including 666!), with the expectation that readers will fill some gaps. Perhaps many could be filled (with varying degrees of satisfaction) by using the plurals of existing items; also, previous writers have often taken a noun (e.g., ending -tomy), then tacked on various verb endings.

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More Chemical Element Letter Banks, Rex Gooch Feb 2004

More Chemical Element Letter Banks, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

These examples (out of 221 found) are in response to Darryl Francis' invitation to "fill the gaps" in his list of elements (W03-315). To recap, Darryl asked for words that contain the same letters as the elements, but disregarded the numbers of each letter. Anagrams, a special case, are asterisked. All place names are from the NIMA database. The subject, and related ones, has been treated at length by Dmitri Borgmann (W78-138ff) and Darryl Francis (W77-229).

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Iouea: A Creative Coup, Stuart Kidd Feb 2004

Iouea: A Creative Coup, Stuart Kidd

Word Ways

In "IOUEA: A Cretaceous Coup" in the November 1003 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe reported her discovery of IOUEA, the name of a fossil sponge genus in The Encyclopedia of Paleontology (1979), written by Rhodes Fairbridge and David Jablonski. (This five-letter-all-vowel word also appears in Nomenclator Zoologicus.) I wrote recently to Dr. Michelle Kelly Shanks, a world authority on sponges, in Auckland, New Zealand after I read in a paper of hers of a living species of the genus IOUEA. I was also interested in how de Laubenfels came to name the genus back in 1955.

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On Location With Pair Isograms, Susan Thorpe Feb 2004

On Location With Pair Isograms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

A pair isogram is a word in which each different letter occurs exactly twice. As a genre, pair isograms can be divided into two types. We can call these split pair isograms (SPIs for short) in which the letters in the first half of the word are repeated, in a different order, in the second half (HORSESHOER); and non-split pair isograms (NSPIs) in which this is not the case (APPEASES).

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Azby-Shiftwords: Edify, Story, Richard Sabey Feb 2004

Azby-Shiftwords: Edify, Story, Richard Sabey

Word Ways

The atbash cipher (or athbash, under which name Web3 defines it) is a Hebrew substitution cipher which replaces the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph, X) but the last (tav, n) which is replaced by the first (aleph, x). Jan Anderson described it in "Fledge Ledge Edge" (WW 8. 1997-229). Naturally, the idea can be applied to our alphabet; following the precedent set by "atbash", I name it the azby cipher.

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The Sorcery Of Context, Michael Constantine Mcconnell Feb 2004

The Sorcery Of Context, Michael Constantine Mcconnell

Word Ways

There are countless one-word palindromes in the English language, many of them common, such as Mom, Dad, poop, boob, sees, racecar, level, and rotor, as well as the names Bob, Otto, Ava, and Hannah. At their most base level, one-word palindromes signify a concept, and the words themselves are palindromic more by coincidence than anything else; they sound perfectly natural when spoken. Slightly longer phrase palindromes, like a red-eyed era and to prefer pot are evasive as naturally uttered speech and in fact probably have been spoken by many yet recognized by few to no listeners or speakers.

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Lego Mindstorms As A Training Tool For Software Development Methodology In Multimedia Education., Elias Wyber Jan 2004

Lego Mindstorms As A Training Tool For Software Development Methodology In Multimedia Education., Elias Wyber

Creative Connections Symposium @ BEAP2004 September 4, 2004

This paper outlines an approach to educating multimedia practitioners utilizing Lego MindStorms® which evolved out of a desire to bridge the technical and aesthetic worldviews. The approach focuses on three aspects of the development process. First, it examines the linguistic model of code production. In order to convey the act of writing code as a linguistic task, the students are introduced to several aspects of linguistic theory, with examples illustrating their application in spoken, programmed and Lego MindStorms® based languages. The second area of focus is object theory. Adopting a similar approach to the previous section, but giving only Lego …

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 36 Issue 4 Nov 2003

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 36 Issue 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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Oiliqo, The Looking-Glass Crab, Jim Puder Nov 2003

Oiliqo, The Looking-Glass Crab, Jim Puder

Word Ways

To set the scene for this leggy crab story, let us first consider a unitary approach to the fallow (but far from exhausted) topic of rotated writing. To begin with some definitions, by "letters" in this context is meant the 52 upper case (u.c.) and lower case (l.c.) letters of the alphabet in their simplest sans-serif forms (in which M and W are stipulated to be exact mutual inverts, the upper and lower loops of B, S and s are stipulated to be equal in size, and so forth); by "words" and "sentences" in this context is meant words and …

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English Words From Greek Letters, Darryl Francis Nov 2003

English Words From Greek Letters, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

For some time I've been bemused by the word UNIX, the name of a computer operating system, because it can be spelled out from the names of two letters of the Greek alphabet, XI and NU. Additionally, the two letters are simply spelled in order backwards. This set me thinking about what other words might exist whose letters could be used to spell out the names of two or more Greek letters. And would any of them display their Greek letters in order or reverse order?

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Trinanagrams, Jim Puder Nov 2003

Trinanagrams, Jim Puder

Word Ways

These trinanagrams - variants of bananagrams in which there are three mystery words rather than two - are dedicated to Edmund Conti in appreciation of his 21 recently concluded installments of "Bananagrams" in Word Ways. To solve a trianagram, first guess the mystery word at the end of the first line of the couplet, based on clues and context. The mystery word at the end of the second line will be reversal word which rhymes with the first word, and the third mystery word will be the reversal of the second word.

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Fumbling And Stalling: More Editorial Lapses, Don Hauptman Nov 2003

Fumbling And Stalling: More Editorial Lapses, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

A few decades ago, IBM and several other high-tech companies invested millions in an attempt to develop a high-speed semiconductor that could operate at low temperatures. The circuit, called a Josephson junction, was ultimately abandoned as impractical. But not before a management consultant referred to the device in a speech. His secretary, transcribing a recording of the talk, rendered the name as Joseph's injunction.

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A Dictionary Of Letter Words, William E. Brandt Jr. Nov 2003

A Dictionary Of Letter Words, William E. Brandt Jr.

Word Ways

Letters can be used to represent words. That is to say, the sounds of the letters can mimic the sounds of words. An example of everyday use of a letter word is the promissory note called an IOU, which stands for, and sounds like, "I owe you". Letters used to present words have been called "grammagrams" by Richard Lederer and "ABC language" by Willard R. Espy. Two books with collections of sentences composed with letters as words are CDB! (Aladdin Paperbacks, 1968) and CDC? (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), both by William Steig. The most well-known example of letter words …

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Aeginrst Transdeleted, Darryl Francis Nov 2003

Aeginrst Transdeleted, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

AEGINRST has over 150 transposals, previously listed and discussed at length in Word Ways and Making the Alphabet Dance. What about the subsets of those letters? There are eight ways of selecting seven letters from AEGINRST, and all of them can be rearranged to form valid words. All are common and in Webster's Third.

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Consonants In Order, Susan Thorpe Nov 2003

Consonants In Order, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

AEIOU in Order (WW98037), UOIEA Words (WW2001313) and On Location With AEIOU (WW2002314) examined words in which the five major vowels each occur just once in alphabetical order, and reverse alphabetical order. This raises the question of words in which the consonants occur in alphabetical order or, indeed, in reverse alphabetical order.

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Synonagrams, Stuart Kidd Nov 2003

Synonagrams, Stuart Kidd

Word Ways

A previous article ("Importunate Permutation: Aphroistical Parochialist" in the August 2003 Word Ways) explored the often entertaining results when transposals are set adjacently. Looking at transposal sets also reveals pairs (and sometimes trios) of words which are to a varying degree synonymous, related or antonymous. I have coined the term 'synonagrams' for the former and retained the current 'antigrams' for the latter, in a selection below.

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The Elusive Triangle, Susan Thorpe Nov 2003

The Elusive Triangle, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Readers of Word Ways have tried to find a 15-letter word which has 5 of one letter, 4 of a second letter, 3 of a third letter, 2 of a fourth letter and 1 of a fifth letter. In Geometrical Words: Part 1 (Word Ways August 1997), I wrote 'The dictionary-sanctioned word which makes triangle with the letter ratio 5:4:3:2:1 remains as elusive as ever, the only representatives are cleverly coined words such as Sir Jeremy Morse's 'linenlessnesses'.

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Extreme Syllabification, A. Ross Eckler Nov 2003

Extreme Syllabification, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Hugo Brandt Corstius has proposed the name oligosyllabic for a word in which the number of letters is more than four times the number of syllables, and hypersyllabic for a word in which the number of letters is less than twice the number of syllables. Oligosyllabic and hypersyllabic words exist for most word lengths, but they are increasingly rare with increasing word length-infact, no Merriam-Webster hypersyllabic words of more than 21 letters or oligosyllabic words for more than 19 letters are known to exist. This is in contrast with the Dutch experience reported by Corstius in the August Word Ways …

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Not Seeing Double, Steve Kahan Nov 2003

Not Seeing Double, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

Each group of letters below is a familiar word, phrase or name from which exactly three pairs of double letters have been removed. The remaining letters are then run together. For example, LGRNWD and ROEVIE would represent the singers LEE GREENWOOD and AARON NEVILLE, respectively. The total number of letters in the original formulation appears in parentheses. How many can you reconstruct?

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Pick Your "-Lily" Adverbs With Care, John J. Henrick Nov 2003

Pick Your "-Lily" Adverbs With Care, John J. Henrick

Word Ways

When John Henry Newman wrote "Lead, Kindly Light" at sea on June 16 1933, he didn't mispunctuate, intending "Lead Kindly, Light". How can one say this with confidence 180 years later? Very simply, because we know that Newman would never had been guilty of such a syntactical faux pas. Instead, he would have had to write "Lead Kindlily, Light", sacrificing sound to sense.

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An Italo-Hebraic Bilingual Homophonous Poem, Ghil 'Ad Zuckermann Nov 2003

An Italo-Hebraic Bilingual Homophonous Poem, Ghil 'Ad Zuckermann

Word Ways

The following is constrained literature, a logological piece, in which the Israeli part sounds identical to the Italian. From the English translations provided below, one can see that the poem(s) make sense, although it has a surreal, evocative flavour, and modernist style. Poetic license is fully employed. As Thomas Paine once said, "The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again".

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Colloquy Nov 2003

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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Definitive Anagrams: D-F Nov 2003

Definitive Anagrams: D-F

Word Ways

Continued from May 2003. Robert McGough helped me pick the "best" throughout this series.

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The Power Of "A" Prefix, Thomas L. Bernard Nov 2003

The Power Of "A" Prefix, Thomas L. Bernard

Word Ways

THe first letter of the alphabet serves many linguistic purposes and numerous grammatical functions. One that has intrigued this writer is the way in which a humble lower case "a" prefix can semantically transform different types of words. This can be in terms of a manner (loud, aloud), a condition (live, alive), a state (lone, alone), or action (rising, arising). Relevant applications can be with nouns, verbs (particularly with present participles), adverbs or prepositions.

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