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Permutations Of United States Capitals, Rex Gooch Feb 2002

Permutations Of United States Capitals, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article was prompted by Darryl Francis's article "Transposing the State Capital" in the November 2001 Word Ways. My apologies to Darryl for treading on his tail, but he lit upon a real challenge. I simply report what I found, but where Darryl has found other permutations (transpositions), I note those so that readers have one combined source. (He used sources other than those quoted below.) In addition, I include a number of plurals unearthed by Susan Thorpe.

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The Oz Contradictionary: Part 4 Feb 2002

The Oz Contradictionary: Part 4

Word Ways

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

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A 15-By-15 Transposition Square, Luc Kumps Feb 2002

A 15-By-15 Transposition Square, Luc Kumps

Word Ways

Abstract unavailable.

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Jailhouse Businesswoman Discourages Gregarious Darrelhousing, Darryl Francis Feb 2002

Jailhouse Businesswoman Discourages Gregarious Darrelhousing, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

This brief article has its origins in the late 1960s, but has been inspired by more recent work in the last two or three years. Howard Bergerson, the then editor of Word Ways, wrote me in July 1969 asking if I could help fill any of the gaps in the list of words sent him by Ross Eckler, a list of words using the vowels AEIOU in the 120 different orders possible. Along with Dmitri Borgmann, I modestly filled a few gaps. The extended list eventually found its way into print as Ross Eckler's article "Unsociable Housemaid Discourages Facetious Behaviour" …

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Dynamaic Trios, Richard Lederer Nov 2001

Dynamaic Trios, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

The number three holds great power and fascination for us. We think about time as past, present and future. We divide our days into morning, noon, and night and our meals into breakfast, lunch and dinner. The human race is made up of men, women and children, and the English language evolved from Old English to Middle English to Modern English.

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All Roads Lead From Shakespeare, Michael Keith Nov 2001

All Roads Lead From Shakespeare, Michael Keith

Word Ways

Sonnet number 60 by William Shakespeare runs as follows.

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More Middle Names, Jeff Grant, Pat Grant Nov 2001

More Middle Names, Jeff Grant, Pat Grant

Word Ways

Inspired by Bill Webster's list of nearly 100 centrally imbedded personal names in the August 2001 Word Ways, we decided to search for more examples.

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Bananagrams 15, Edmund Conti Nov 2001

Bananagrams 15, 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. I am indebted to Rex Gooch for supplying suitable anagrams in his "Dual Perms" article in the August issue. Answers can be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 4, Jeremiah Farrell Nov 2001

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 34 Issue 4, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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The Model A Palindrome Machine, Bill A. O'Connor Nov 2001

The Model A Palindrome Machine, Bill A. O'Connor

Word Ways

This machine, the Model A palindrome (PD) generator, will permit you to make PDs as easily as spinning a pirouette on a kitchen stool and falling flat on your nose in the kitty litter, right in front of the Bishop. True, it will not allow you to create PDs without taking a little thought, but draw comfort in your great affliction form the fact that a completely automatic PD generator is currently in the works; keep watching the most cutting-edge of logojournals, Word Ways.

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Puzzles And Games On Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell Nov 2001

Puzzles And Games On Word Configurations, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

In their article "Numerical Patterns and Geometrical Configurations" on pages 82-92 of Mathematics Magazine 57 (1984), Harold Dorwart and Warren Page note that the venerable David Hilbert once remarked "...there was a time when the study of configurations was considered the most important branch of all geometry." "Today," added Dorwart and Page, "...most students have limited knowledge about configurations-except perhaps the Pappus (9,3), the Desargue (10,3), and the Petersen graph (the logo on the cover of the Journal of Graph Theory)."

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Number Names In Words And Phrases, Rex Gooch Nov 2001

Number Names In Words And Phrases, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

Ross Eckler's Making the ALphabet Dance (St. Martin's 1996) lists 20 words on page 236, each containing one of the number names from 1 to 20, using the Pocket Merriam-Webster as source. As an example, COUNTERFEIT contains FOURTEEN. The following page similarly list 26 of the number names for 30 to 99 included in words from Webster's Second, many found by Jeremy Morse.

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Transposing The State Capitals, Darryl Francis Nov 2001

Transposing The State Capitals, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

The subject of finding transposals for the US state names has been documented many times in Word Ways. However, I don't believe that any attention has been paid to seeking transposals for the names of the state capitals. I decided to have a shot at seeing how many of the 50 state capital names could be transposed. Initially, my hopes were not particularly high-I expected to find no more than a handful of transposable names, perhaps 5 or 6. In the event, I unearthed 20 transposals, some of them perfectly good dictionary words, and others requiring a little more flexibility …

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Full Many A Sonnet End-Word Have I Seen, Mike Keith Nov 2001

Full Many A Sonnet End-Word Have I Seen, Mike Keith

Word Ways

The poem below is constructed from the 308 first and last words from the 154 Shakespearean sonnets. Although done in a free-verse style, it is based on the 'ballad supreme' form, with three stanzas, each ending with the same refrain, followed by an 'envoy'.

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Colloquy Nov 2001

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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Modern Nine-Squares, Chris Cole Nov 2001

Modern Nine-Squares, Chris Cole

Word Ways

Thousands of nine-squares are known to logology, so one of the remaining challenges is to build them from restricted sources. This article discusses building a nine-square using only words and phrases that are in current use. Consider, for example, the following nine-square.

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Acrostic Variations, Susan Thorpe Nov 2001

Acrostic Variations, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Much has been written on the history of the acrostic as a form of wordplay, both in Word Ways and elsewhere, and I do not intend to dwell upon the aspect of the genre. Suffice to say that the acrostic seems to have first appeared in the 1850s, had its Victorian heyday, and then disappeared from mainstream wordplay as it gave way to the crossword puzzle in 1913.

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Patterns In Dutch For Ten-Letter Words, Hugo Brandt Corstius Nov 2001

Patterns In Dutch For Ten-Letter Words, Hugo Brandt Corstius

Word Ways

In "Near-Alternating Vowels and Consonants" in the August 2000 issue of Word Ways, A. Ross Eckler exhibited English words for all but three of the 178 distinct ways one can assign consonants and vowels to ten-letter words so that there are no more than two consonants or two vowels in succession. In the following, I demonstrate that one can find Dutch examples for all 178 patterns. For the VVCCVVCCVV pattern I could find only one Dutch word.

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Britannia Rules The Waves; Others Waive The Rules, Don Hauptman Nov 2001

Britannia Rules The Waves; Others Waive The Rules, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

The New York Press is a free weekly "alternative" newspaper that is livelier and less doctrinaire than The Village Voice, its archival.

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Thoughts On Being Plagiarized (Sort Of), Richard Kostelanetz Nov 2001

Thoughts On Being Plagiarized (Sort Of), Richard Kostelanetz

Word Ways

I've always regarded my work as so extreme and idiosyncratic that, if only to define its integrity, it resisted plagiarism. In fact, little has proved my assumption wrong. Some 35 years ago, a Columbia professor doing an anthology of short fiction presented ideas that looked suspiciously familiar, even though mine hadn't yet been published. I thought the prof might have gotten them from a manuscript submitted to a magazine of which he was a junior editor. Since the prof was more than ten years my senior, while I was 25, I had a problem confronting him. I recall writing a …

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Darehitsfibertyros!, William Webster Nov 2001

Darehitsfibertyros!, William Webster

Word Ways

No, this title is not a German curse - rather, it is an instruction to Read This Brief Story. How so? Divide the title into the four words Dare Hits Fiber Tyros, and anagram the letters of each word into another word. Now try the same strategy on the following 225-letter story of a Scrabble tournament.

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Sets Of Words With Alphabetic Progression, Rex Gooch Nov 2001

Sets Of Words With Alphabetic Progression, Rex Gooch

Word Ways

This article responds to the challenge posed by Susan Thorpe on page 212 of the August 2001 issue of Word Ways. We seek a word that still produces valid words when the first letter is replaced by A, and when the second letter is replaced by B, etc. However, much of this article is taken up with two generalizations. The first is to examine other word lengths. In the second, we depart from the concept of invariance, in which the position of a letter in the word is the same as its position in the alphabet, and merely require that …

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Anything Trilinear, Darryl Francis Nov 2001

Anything Trilinear, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

Why anything trilinear? Those two words in the title are non-crashing isomorphs of the two-word term "Designer Isomorphs," the title of Susan Thorpe's article in the May 2001 issue. (A quick reminder: isomorphs are words having the same letter pattern. Susan's example was EXCESS BAMBOO, with both words sharing the pattern 123144, ANYTHING and DESIGNER share the pattern 12345627, while TRILINEAR and ISOMORPHS share the pattern 123435672. Two isomorphs are said to crash if they share the same letter(s) in the same position(s). ANYTHING and DESIGNER don't crash, and neither do TRILINEAR and ISOMORPHS, so they are noncrashing isomorphs).

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Kickshaws, David Morice Nov 2001

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Uoiea Words, Susan Thorpe Nov 2001

Uoiea Words, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

This is a companion to AEIOU in Order (Word Ways 98037 with additions in 98115 and 99262). It lists words in which the five vowels each occur once, in reverse alphabetical order. A few of these words have appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Language on Vacation and/or in Word Ways, but the majority of them will be new to readers.

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Loldigocks And The Bhree Tears, William Brandt Jr. Nov 2001

Loldigocks And The Bhree Tears, William Brandt Jr.

Word Ways

Once upon a time there was a gittle lid with such pretty cellow yurls that people called her Loldigocks. Loldigocks lived with her mother in a cittle lottage near a fig borest. Whenever Loldigocks asked if she could go for a walk in the fig borest, her mother would always say "Nertainly sot! The fig borest is doo tangerous! It is full of bicked wears that like to eat gittle lirls!"

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Trandformations Of A Text (A Literary Puzzle), Paul Maxim Nov 2001

Trandformations Of A Text (A Literary Puzzle), Paul Maxim

Word Ways

This mysterious document, entitled Text B, was found among the literary remains of a famous author. It should not be confused with Minoan B, which represents an entirely different rubric.

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Back Cover Nov 2001

Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

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Answers And Solutions Nov 2001

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

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

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Complementary Letters Nov 2001

Complementary Letters

Word Ways

The hidden DNA message in "The Oz Contradictioanry: Part 2" in the May issue, EVOLVE BY LOVE, was decoded by modeling an alphabet: anti-alphabet array after the anti-parallel structure of the double helix to dictate 26 base pairs, i.e., the complementary letter bigrams az by ex dw ev fu gt hs ir jq kp lo mn nm ol pk qj ri sh tg uf ve wd xc yb ca. Tandemly combining some of these yielded the above message, plus three other phrases nicely relevant to the adjoining polyanagram poem "Biodiversity". Can you find these? They involve two new words plus …

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