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Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Sesquipedalianists, Seek No Longer, Peter Delin

Word Ways

Most actual and incipient logologists seem to pass through of being fascinated by long words, and raising such questions as what is the longest word in English or American. One reason for the eventual passing of this phase, for most of us, is the eventual realization of the fact that, as it is by no means simple to decide what counts as a word.

Unusual New Zealand Place Names, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

New Zealand is a small Pacific country about the size of Colorado. A lot of places here bear their original Maori names, the most famous being the 85-letter TAUMATAWHAKATANGIHANGAKOAUAUOTAMATEATURIPUKAKAPIKIMAUNGAHORONUKUPOKAIWHENUAKITANATAHU, a hill about 40 miles south of where I live in Hawke's Bay province.

Word Stools

Word Ways

This is the third in a series exploring meaningful word ladders, the first two appearing in the August issue. "Word Stools" is my nickname for one-step word ladders-pairs of related words differing by a single letter, e.g. indolence & insolence, the primary problems confronting teachers. They've been noted often and are the basis of amusing typos plus a true abundance of popular alliterative or rhyming phrases like tick-tock, hip hop, fat cat, brain drain, teenie weenie, nappy-happy. Like these the following pairs crash in all but one position, "high crash". A couple are charades. With one heartfelt exception, I've limited …

Word Girders, Chris Cole

Word Ways

On p 160 of Language on Vacation (1965), Dmitri Borgmann issued the challenge "For the logophile who feels the urge to explore virgin territory, word girders are just the thing." A word girder is constructed by exchanging letters between a pair of words to form another pair of words. Borgmann lists three 5-letter examples.

Ladder Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

PERVERSER, HASHISHES and INSINKING are examples of what I call Ladder Words. Each word is a self-contained ladder (PER-VER-SET, HAS-HIS-HES, INS-INK-ING) in which each trigram (3-letter group) differs from its trigram neighbour(s) by a single letter, just as do the words in a word ladder. All the examples of ladder words below are either solid words or hyphenated words. Hyphens are not shown. All 3 trigramism must be different, so that GONGOLGON (in New South Wales) is not acceptable. A few words of this genre appeared in Colloquy 98116 and these are identified in the lists below by an asterisk*. …

Bananagrams 19, 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 anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve the anagrams.

Consonant Cascades

Word Ways

Concluding a series on meaningful word ladders, here's another special type of ladder. Consonant cascades (CCs) are meaningful cases of "consonant movements" (CMs) in which all substitutions occur at the same position. They are modeled on vowel cascades and vowel movements (02-53), so ideally the ladders are alphabetical or anti-alphabetical. The Word Stool bake cake, if a Japanese fish cake, can expand to Bake cake (fake hake?), make sake.

A Nine-Square With A Non-Palindrome Diagonal, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

As explained in my article Nine-Square with Palindromic Diagonal (Word Ways May 2002), the SW-NE diagonal must be palindromic. Such squares are rare (say, as common as ten-squares). Distinctly rarer is a nine-square such as follows, which has a frequency I estimate to be around 1 in 300,000 nine-squares.

Two New Pangrammic Challenges, Mark Isaak

Word Ways

The alphabet has 26 letters, but writing uses more than 26 symbols. If I want to display all the elements of a typeface, for example, "the quick brown fox..." does not suffice. My first challenge is to create a pangram which, following accepted conventions of capitalization, displays all 26 letters in both upper and lower case.

One + Twelve = Two + Eleven

Word Ways

1. Eleven + two = twelve + one is an amazing and rightly famous anagram. I wish to add to its mystique by revealing some more deep coincidences, based on rearranging the terms to

2. two + eleven = one + twelve, or, as I prefer.

3. one + twelve = two + eleven (a word reversal of equation #1).

These two are also anagrams and palindromes in numerical form (shown for #3): 1+12=2+11. (The palindrome requires altered punctuation, as is conventional in verbal palindromes.) More surprisingly, they're both anagrams and palindromes in Roman numerals as well: I+XII=II+XI.

Kickshaws

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Shiftgrams Revisited, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The concept of word-shifts was introduced in Dmitri Borgmann's Language on Vacation (1965). Consider the word COLD for instance. Shifting each of the letters three spaces forward in the alphabet, COLD becomes FROG: and shifting the letters of CHEER seven spaces forward produces JOLLY. Dmitri offered many other examples in his book.

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

Word Neighbours And Onalosis, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article is a partial update of my "Statistics of Word Neighbours" in the November 1997 Word Ways, and provides the facts laying behind the findings in the recent series (August 2000 through May 2001) of articles on word ladders. Two words are neighbours if they differ in a single letter. In this article, each such word is credited as having a neighbour, i.e. the link between them in counted twice (please refer to the earlier article for prior work and more information). The following table updates various parts of the article.

Special Word-Unit Windows In Running Text, Mike Keith

Word Ways

The idea of searching existing for accidental windows (contiguous blocks of text) having special properties has been explored often in Word Ways, but previous studies have usually considered letter-unit constraints such as the lipogram or pangram. In this article, inspired by similar explorations in the new edition of Opperlands! Taal- & letterkunde (Battus' seminal book on Dutch wordplay), we focus on textual windows having special word-unit properties.

On Location With Aeiou, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

AEIOU Words, those which contain just one each of the 5 major vowels, have always held a fascination for logologists, especially those words in which the 5 vowels appear in alphabetical order (AEIOU), and reverse alphabetical order (UOIEA), respectively. FACETIOUS and SUBCONTINENTAL are examples. Below, I offer a substantial addition to the collections of these words which have already appeared in Word Ways. Most of them are the names of locations taken from The United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN). These are populated places unless stated otherwise. Let us begin by taking a brief look at the current state …

Mixed-Up Classics, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In his article "No Gnus is Good Gnus" in the February 2002 Word Ways, Jim Puder showed what might have happened to some famous palindromes if their authors had been "suffering from the gnus", for example, A man, a pung, a gnu - Panama.

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 35 Issue 3

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

My First Ten-Square, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

A ten-square should consist of ten different 10-letter words, all to be found in reputable dictionaries or perhaps gazetteers, arranged one under another so that the first row word is the same as the first column word, and so on, ie something like.

Moose Laurels: New Spoonerisms, Part 1, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Since childhood, I have indulged a perverse fascination with spoonerisms, chaismus, and other forms of linguistic reversal. This passion culminated in the publication of my quasi-definitive book on transpositional humor, Cruel and Unusual Puns (Dell, 1991).

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

On The Abundance Of Palindromes, Jim Puder

Word Ways

A very long time ago there lived a tribe of primitive cave-people who had learned how to write but who could not yet speak in complete sentences. When, therefore, Thog the Thinker one day ascended the Speaker's Stone and casually let drop the first complete sentence that anyone had ever heard, the sensation was terrific. Thog's achievement was all the more astounding inasmuch as the tribe's wisest heads had long opined, in disconnected grunts, that the formulation of a complete sentence was a feat considerably beyond the compass of human ingenuity. In a state of high excitement, Skog the Scrivener …

Silvery Sleep, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

August 2002 is the 25th, or silver, anniversary of the death of rock 'n' roll singer Elvis Presely. Elvis died in August 1977, and has been the subject of two previous articles of mine in Word Ways, "Elvis Lives" in February 1993, and "Elvis for Everyone" in May 1993. Prompted by recent trips to Tupelo, Mississippi (his birthplace) and Memphis, Tennessee, I decided to take a new look at the wordplay that could be spun around some of the words, names and song titles in Elvis' life and career. My findings are presented here twenty-five years after Elvis' death.

Meaningful Word Ladders

Word Ways

Word ladders are strings of equal-length words that change one letter at each step. They have featured often in Word Ways since the first issue (Borgmann '68-27: Eckler's '69-70, Corbin '88-103, Gordon '90-22, 154, and especially Gooch '98-89 + '00-209, 212, 284). These references are the source of many of the word pairs and a few of the strings used here. But while their ladders often connected related words, the connecting words are generally irrelevant to the terminal pair. Here and in three accompanying articles I present cases in which the whole ladder makes some sort of coherent sense, a …

Powerful Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

There are two types of what I call powerful words:

whole words whose letter totals (assigning a=1, b=2, ... z=26) are a square, a cube etc.

words which break into a series of letter groups each of whose total is a square, cube etc.

Let us begin by taking a look at the first of these types of powerful word. Unreferenced words are in the OED, Second Edition. Sources of non-OED words are given at the end.

Of Visa For The Mind, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

We've all heard the story, possibly apocryphal, about the computer program for language translation which renders "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into Russian and then back to English as "The whiskey is fine but the meat has gone bad." I wondered just how likely it was that such a humorous result would occur and, more importantly, just how useful is such a program for meaningful translation? Using the Lernout & Hauspie Simply Translating program which translates English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish and from those languages back to English, I picked six common aphorisms …

Forwards And Backwards Words, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article is mainly concerned with what I will call Forwards and Backwards words, in which the letter progress forwards through the alphabet to the middle of the word, then backwards. The reverse, Backwards and Forwards words, are also dealt with. However, to begin, I recapitulate the simpler cases of words in which each successive letter occupies a later position in the alphabet (which, clearly, I must call Forwards words), and those in which each successive letter occupies an earlier position in the alphabet (Backwards words).

Bananagrams 18, 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 anagram, and the couplet itself will offer clues to help solve the anagram.