Digital Commons Network^™

Punk Whiz 14: State Of The Pun, A. Anil

Word Ways

In this mostly easy pun quiz all the answers are states or provinces of the US, Canada or Australia. (4|4) means the answer is a charade of the state's name whose two parts are hints -- homophonic puns of words or phrases that are not necessarily 4 and 4 letters. Answers are out back.

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of the issue.

A Cryptic Puzzle From The London Times, Dana Richards

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle.

Homage To The Biliteral Society, Dave Morice

Word Ways

"Two cheers for the Biliteral Society!" I said after reading about its Dictionary of Two-Letter Words in the August 1984 issue of Word Ways. At last an official organization has recognized the importance of words that have a beginning and an end, but no middle to confuse things. In honor of the society's duplicity, I wrote a poem inspired by the diatomic nature of first-and-last-letter-only words.

Runes: Past And Present, Elliott S. Evans

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how the primary function of runes has changed through history. In doing so this study also begins to document the reemergence of runes especially in Asatru circles. Runes were historically employed for utilitarian purposes whereas they have been imbued with magical qualities in the eyes of their modern users. By using a modified version of the speech act theory, the notion of "magic" is linguistically operationalized and used to demonstrate the stark contrast between the primary purpose of historical runic texts and modern ones.

The Konami Code: An Experiment In Dialect Pedagogy, Thomas Cunningham

Theses and Dissertations

The Konami Code is a tool for teaching stage dialects that I have been developing for the past three years. I wanted a method that didn’t rely on students’ having a keen ear for phonetics; rather one that offered context for each dialect, and presented individual sound-changes as small parts of an easy way to digest the whole. Most importantly, I wanted a process that was portable: a set series of applications that my students could incorporate easily into their actor’s tool-kit and carry with them into the professional world. The Konami Code incorporates kinesthetic and imaginative elements into the …

Dynamic Assessment In A Yugtun Second Language Intermediate Adult Classroom, Stephen Walkie Charles

Linguistics

Dynamic Assessment is a new theoretical framework for language assessment, and it is particularly relevant for underrepresented languages and learners. For this study the process is investigated in the context of Yugtun second language learners at a university level. This qualitative teacher action research was a study that involved seven students enrolled in an intermediate Yup'ik language course and that comprised three DA sessions over the course of one semester. The intention in using DA was not to help learners do better on the tests but to understand their development in the language. The hope was that DA interactions would …

Shakespeare - Syler [My True Love Gave To Me, A 12-Step Program Concerning Dunce-Caps & Diadems], Nathan Samuel Ellingsen

ESSAI

No abstract provided.

"I Hear America Singing": An Approach To Poetry's Coalescent Intricacies Of Sound, Structure, And Content, Meagan Ashleigh Brooks

Masters Theses

Poetry, because it is an art form, is compared to other arts such as painting and even architecture, but because the elements of poetry evince musical qualities, the comparison between poetry and music merits a greater degree of attention. While analyzing the musical elements of poetry is a fascinating study on its own, the purpose of analyzing the two art forms is to develop a greater understanding of each work as a whole. This includes understanding not only the the sum of the parts but also what is achieved beyond the sum. Although some elements of poetry are parallel to …

Narrative Preferences And Administrative Due Process, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

This Article illustrates, through sociolinguistic analysis, how an adjudicator’s biases against certain narrative styles can influence his or her assessments of credibility, treatment of parties, and decision-making in the administrative law setting. Poverty lawyers have long observed that many claimants in the administrative state continue to face procedural and discursive obstacles. Applying insights from a growing field of inter-disciplinary research, including conversation analysis, linguistics, and cognitive studies, this Article builds upon those observations by more precisely exploring through a case study of an unemployment insurance benefits hearing how structural and narrative biases can work to deny an applicant due process …

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 44 Number 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue, including a table of contents.

My Fifteen Minutes Of Fame, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes (Andy Warhol, 1968)

Not world-famous, and for less than ten minutes ... but on December 12 2010 I saw myself portrayed by a professional actor to an audience of 35 on an off-Broadway (Jersey City) stage. The 90-minute one-act play, "Logomaniacs" bu Paul Fleischman, consisted of short sketches of 26 wordplay notables, one for each letter of the alphabet, from Walter Abish who wrote Alphabetical Africa ("Ages ago, Alex, Allan and Alva arrived at Antibes...") to Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, including Howard Chace who invented Anguish Languish ("Ladle …

A Backdoor Approach To Lipograms, A. Anil

Word Ways

How many letters can be excluded and still produce a recognizable lipogram of Mary's Lamb? For starters, excluding five letters jkqxz has no effect as they're absent in the original. Excluding five more letters bfpvy had a minimal effect, as see here (substitute words underlined).

Colloquy

Word Ways

Responses to previously published articles.

Resolving The Riddle: Plan Bee, Jim Puder

Word Ways

The discovery by Ronnie B. Kon, which he reported in the Nov. 2010 Word Ways, of an earlier, different version of Faith Eckler's refractory "1831" riddle constitutes a breakthrough, I believe, in the decades-old effort to deduce a convincing answer to this stumper. Whereas before, this riddle had seemed (to me, at least) to be intractably baffling, now, suddenly, a satisactorily suasive solution to it is discernable.

From Trash To Ashtray, Solomon W. Golomb

Word Ways

Standard "pig Latin" transforms an English word by relocating all consonant sounds (if any) before the first vowel from the beginning to the end of the word, and then appending the sound to -ay. Examples include: run to unray; black to ackblay, mice to icemay, and act to actay. Pig Latin is intended to modify spoken English, so it should operate on pronunciations, not spellings. Thus: gem to emjay (or M.J.), hour to ouray, and wide to I'd weigh. Of special interest are words that become new English words or expressions in …

A Lot Of Hot Air, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

A lot of hot air has been generated in an attempt to solve the riddle first proposed in Word Ways in 1981. I believe that Ronnie Kon has unwittingly given us the clue that will reveal the riddle's answer. He notes that it first appeared in Dickson's Balloon Almanac in 1801, and we need to discover what kind of publication that was.

A Poem, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

"Bedtime"

Word Rings From Rearranged Alphabets, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

On page wu (wort-uiteinden) of Opperlauns! taal- & letterkunde (Querido, 2003), Battus (pseudonym of Hugo Brandt Corstius) constructed lists of 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-letter Dutch words in which the end of one word was the start of the next: for example, query, yapok, knoop, ... zamac, clash. Each letter of the Dutch alphabet was used once in a word-join. By rearranging the alphabet to accommodate rare starts and endings, Battus created strings using every letter.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute.

"A Word Of Difference", J. James Mancuso

Word Ways

A selection of some neologisms for publication in Word Ways: starting with letters C through E, submitted on 2 Nov 2010.

Cipher Wheels For Cheerfuller Hallmarking, Christopher Mcmanus

Word Ways

Cipher wheels are a well-known method of cryptography. Their embodiments range from the Jefferson wheel, invented by the American President Thomas Jefferson, to the Enigma machine, whose solution was critical to the course of World War II. Not surprisingly, cipher wheels are related to several basic topics in wordplay. These topics include non-crashing word sets, shiftwords, collinear words, halfway words and reflectors.

Anagram Quiz, A. Anil

Word Ways

The clues are definitive anagrams or polyanagrams of the answers. Most are reversible anagrams from up/dn and Word Ways here given in reverse order. Reversible anagrams are pairs that work either way, eg, pat=tap = tap=pat. To be definitions of each other they should be grammatically compatible, as most here are. Answers are out back.

Dogging The Wag: More Amusing Bloopers And Puckish Retorts, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

Last fall, a weekly e-zine published by someone I know -- I'll omit identifying information here -- ran me this announcement:

"Novelist Ford Madox Ford once said that you can 'open the book to page 99 and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.' He's now putting his idea to the test by launching http://www.page99test.com in a few weeks. This new site will allow any authors (or aspiring authors) to upload the 99th page of their books and allow readers to comment on whether they would buy or like to read the rest of their books."

Does …

Spoonerism Riddles, Will Shortz

Word Ways

Last summer on my weekly puzzle segment on NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" I ran a creative competition involving spoonerism riddles. Listeners were invited to submit original riddles in which each answer involved a spoonerism.

A Poem, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

"Twiddle-bug"

Kickshaws Feb 2011

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Post-Its -- 1, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

The building blocks for this vocabulary quiz are provided courtesy of the United States Postal Service. For instance, given the clue "misnomers", the requisite response is formed by concatenating the official two-letter abbreviations of the states of California, Colorado, New York, and Mississippi to produce CA CO NY MS The first dozen examples solicit six-letter words made up of three two-letter abbreviations, while the final quartet has answers that are each eight letters in length and thus require four such abbreviations. To facilitate the discovery process, all required blocks have been supplied, with the number of times each appears indicated …

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

Some Words To The Wise: A Book Review, Karen Farrell

Word Ways

A book review of Steven Kahan's Some Words to the Wise: Sixty More Adventures in Logology for the Connoisseur.