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Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to some of the puzzles contained in this issue.

Witwits - Part 1, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

A WITWIT is merely an acronym for "Where In The World Is That?," an orthographic challenge that I introduced in May I Have A Word With You?. In the first of this seven-part series, two dozen letter sequences have been extracted, without interruption, from either the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Reinserting each into its proper position at the rate of one per hour, you'll identify the sources of all these sequences in a single day. Moreover, you'll certainly have the last laugh and avoid a fracas provided you recognize that HAHA came from BROUHAHA!

Instructions To Authors, Back Cover

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute and readers interested in subscribing, as well as the back cover of this issue.

Hospitalisation, Sir Jeremy Morse

Word Ways

A poem

The Broad Ripple Puzzle-Game, Jeremiah Farrell, Karen Farrell

Word Ways

As reported in the November issue of Word Ways, Peggy Boulden's class from Indianapolis' Broad Ripple High School recently visited Butler University for a presentation of mathematical word play. In addition to the magic spelling trick described in November we used the nine different letters in BROAD RIPPLE in the following word puzzle.

Synonym Pudding, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Webster's Tenth Collegiate dictionary lists synonyms of headword adjectives in two ways: in small caps in the main definition set, and at the end with the heading syn followed by a group of additional small cap synonyms. Approximately 220 of the headword adjectives merit the syn treatment, and the one thousand synonyms they dissect represent about one-sixth of the headword adjectives.

Feminist, Linguistic, And Rhetorical Perspectives On Language Reform, William Dorner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As people become aware that society treats women unfairly, they also perceive related shortcomings in the way that Modern English references women. For example, many have objected to the so-called generic he, the third-person masculine pronoun employed to refer to a person of unknown gender, and provided several alternatives, few of which have been widely adopted. Nonetheless, change is evident in the case of they becoming an increasingly common solution to refer to a person of unidentified gender. The intentional reform of the Modern English language, both in the past and present, has been a result of people's reactions to …

Always Judged: A Case Study Of An Interview Using Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Legal interviews are infrequently recorded and rarely studied. The few empirical studies of actual legal interviews have been primarily critical of the lawyers for being too controlling, eager to impose a solution on the clients, and uninterested in the message the clients want to convey. This article presents a case study of something heretofore unavailable – an experienced, expert attorney conducting a successful initial interview with an actual client. This article uses ethnographic conversation analysis to describe the interview in terms of question form, interruptions, control of the floor, and expressions of empathy. It relies upon the insights from prior …

Estandarizacion Linguistica Y Construccion Nacional: La Norma Espanola Y La Norma Americana (1823-1857), Laura Villa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes five salient moments in the history of the standardization of the Spanish language that took place in the central decades of the nineteenth century: first, the reformed spelling system proposed in London by Andrés Bello and Juan García del Río in 1823 in order to promote Latin American literacy; second, the simultaneous officialization in 1844 of two different orthographic norms in Chile and Spain, both of them surrounded by intense ideological debates, the former led by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the latter by a teachers' association established in Madrid; third, the publication in 1847 of Bello's grammar, which …

Children's Tolerance Of Word-Form Variation, Paul Reeves Breuning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study compared children's (N=96, mean age 4;1, range 2;8-5;3) and adults' (N=96, mean age 21 years) tolerance of word-onset modifications (e.g., wabbit and warabbit) and pseudo affixes (e.g., kocat and catko) in a label extension task. Trials comprised an introductory phase where children saw a picture of an animal and were told its name, and a test phase where they were shown the same picture along with one of a different animal. For `similar-name' trials, participants heard a word-form modification of the previously introduced name (e.g., introduced to a dib, they were asked, `which animal is a wib?'). For …

An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis Of African American English: A Comparative Study Of Two Dialects, Catherine A. Adams

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

In this thesis, I contribute acoustic phonetic data and analysis to the study of African American English (AAE). For this research, I collected speech samples of self-identified AAE speakers and speakers of a dominant coexisting dialect, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). I analyze these samples to determine if vowel quality and vowel duration are consistently and predictably varied between the two dialects. Labov's Chain Shift Principles are used as the context for the results.

In my analysis, I find that both vowel quality and duration are different between AAE and NCS in ways previously undocumented in the linguistic literature. The …

On The Existence (And Distribution) Of Sentential Subjects, William D. Davies, Stanley Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Topicalization In Malagasy: Effects Of Teaching Malagasy As A Topic Language, Jeremy D. Workman

Theses and Dissertations

This study discusses teaching Malagasy as a second language. Malagasy is the native language spoken on the island of Madagascar. Traditionally, Malagasy has been taught as a language that is similar to English in the way that it uses active and passive voice constructions. However, most native-English students struggle to produce native-like utterances using non-active voice constructions in Malagasy. Recent studies have suggested that Malagasy more closely relates to Germanic V2 languages than it does to English (Pearson 2005, Hyams et al. 2006). This might explain why students taught Malagasy as an English-like language struggle. This study compares the relative …

The Pars Triangularis In Dyslexia And Adhd: A Comprehensive Approach., Michelle Y. Kibby, Judith M Kroese, Hillery Krebbs, Crystal E Hill, George W Hynd

Publications

Limited research has been conducted on the structure of the pars triangularis (PT) in dyslexia despite functional neuroimaging research finding it may play a role in phonological processing. Furthermore, research to date has not examined PT size in ADHD even though the right inferior frontal region has been implicated in the disorder. Hence, one of the purposes of this study was to examine the structure of the PT in dyslexia and ADHD. The other purposes included examining the PT in relation to overall expressive language ability and in relation to several specific linguistic functions given language functioning often is affected …

Flarr Pages #67: The Understanding Of The Concept Fact In Modern English (The Research Is Based On The English-Language Textbooks), Roza Rokhvadze

FLARR Pages

Linguistics in a narrow sense is always interested in language. The language can be observed from different levels: level of text, sentence and word. These levels in their tern are considered from the viewpoint of pragmatics, semantics, cognitive meaning, syntax, grammar, etc. The word, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, is the smallest speech unit It seems to be nothing confusing with words, as their meanings are given in dictionaries and their syntactical functions are defined even by Aristotle. But we know that language has its dynamic process - it changes in all aspects. With the technical progress and cutting-edge society …

A Poem: Natural Order, Jeremy Morse

Word Ways

A poem

Trading Places, Richard Lederer, Norm Storer

Word Ways

A number of words become new words when, contemporaneously, the front letter is looped to the back and the back to the front. The first and last letters must be different, of course, and the result of this double loop is that the first and last letters are exchanged. If the middle letters are palindromic, the pair becomes palindromic.

Front Cover, Table Of Contents

Word Ways

Front Cover, Publication Information, Table of Contents

Ten-Letter Triangular Progressions, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the May 2009 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe introduced the concept of a triangular progression. Partition a six-letter word into groups of one, two and three letters. Calculate the numerical value of each group, and determine the difference between groups two and one, and three and two. The object is to find words for which the differences are constant.

Back To Albuquerque Again, Steve Kahan

Word Ways

Our third visit to Albuquerque offers a new collection of words named in honor of the city. Each contains a pair of identical letter triads that are separated by at least one other letter. After their excision, any gaps that have been created are closed by compression in order to form the residue of the original word. Said residues, found in Column A, require the reintroduction of appropriately placed triads found in Column B in order to reestablish the original Albuquerque word. As has become customary, five impostors are included in Column B, since each triad is available for use …

Shepherdesses, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The 2-letter word MO can be extended by one letter at a time up to the 9-letter MODERNEST, with all combinations being allowable words in international Scrabble: MO, MOD, MODE, MODER, MODERN, MODERNE, MODERNES, MODERNEST. Seven of these are found in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th Edition, 2006. The exception is MODER, a layer of humus intermediate between mor and mull (Chambers Dictionary, 1998).

Colloquy

Word Ways

Comments on past articles.

Kickshaws, Dave Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

A Poem: Pop-Star, Jeremy Morse

Word Ways

A poem

Elemental Crossword, Mark J. P. Wolf

Word Ways

With a little bit of imagination, the Periodic Table of Elements can be seen as a rather strange and inelegant crossword puzzle, which is asymmetrical in form and contains such bizarre words like "RbSrYZrNbMoTcRuRhPd" and HLiNaKCuRbAgCaAuFr". After major readjustments, here is a crossword puzzle that solves some of those problems. Each square of the solution contains an element, which, when combined, completes a real word. Some elements are used more often than others, of course, and some are not used at all. One of the interesting things about this crossword is that it is not always clear from the boxes …

More Accidental Tautonyms, Jim Puder

Word Ways

Tautonyms - i.e., words, phrases, etc. whose spelling is tautological - are of two kinds: terms such as froufrou and Pago Pago, which were fashioned from two or more identical subunits, and terms such as hotshots and valval, which were not. In the first group, tautological spelling is automatic, while in the second group its occurrence is a matter of chance.

Punc Lib Charades, A Anil

Word Ways

Most charades involve respacing the letters, creating new words, as in therapist: the rapist. In contrast the following group do not change the words or spacing, only the punctuation. I call them Punc Lib charades. Like punk kids in the old sense, liberated puncs break out of their cages and run freely among the words wreaking havoc, totally altering if not reversing the meaning. The lowly comma in particular wreaks to high heaven.

Spelling Reform, Mark Setteducati

Word Ways

European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union, rather than German, which was the other possibility.

A Poem: Magic Word, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

A poem.

Word Magic, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

These effects are excerpts from Gardner's forthcoming book on word play to be published by Sterling.