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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 21, Number 1 Feb 1988

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 21, Number 1

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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A Puzzler's Paradise, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

A Puzzler's Paradise, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Listed below are 34 kinds of word puzzles, games and curiosities, each one in scrambled form. Your assignment is to rearrange the letters of each one into its correct order. Simple enough? Of course! Why 34 scrambles, instead of some number that shows a healthy respect for the decimal system? Because 34 happens to be the total of each row, column and main diagonal in a magic square of the fourth order - sufficient reason!

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Back Cover Feb 1988

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of this issue including instructions to authors.

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Sets Of Mutually Antonymic Words, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Sets Of Mutually Antonymic Words, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Two words - life and death, yes and no, black and white - precisely or approximately opposite each other in meaning are called antonyms. By and large, antonyms have received little attention in the logological realm. Exceptions have been two opposite concepts expressed by the same word (TEMPER means both "to harden" and "to soften") and two words anatomic in their most obvious senses which are synonyms in some other sense (to "best" and to "worst" both mean "to get the better of"). Some words have numerous antonyms, phenomenon one of synonym rather than of antonymy.

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Robots On The Rampage, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Robots On The Rampage, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

In 1920, the Czech playwright Karel Capek thrust Rossum's Universal Robots upon an unsuspecting world. The robots in his play, "R.U.R.", were artificially manufactured persons, mechanically efficient but at first devoid of sensibility. They eventually acquired souls and began acting like human beings, revolting against their masters and destroying them.

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Death: A Logological Perspective, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Death: A Logological Perspective, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

In my continuing search for answers to Life's Great Questions, I have run across a major imbalance between Birth and Death. That imbalance is by no means obvious to the casual observer, however. Both BIRTH and DEATH are five-letter, one-syllable words ending in the digraph TH. In addition, their first letters are only two spaces apart in the alphabet, and the printed lowercase forms of those letters, b and d, happen to be mirror images or reversals of one another. One can, accordingly, not really ask for greater congruence between BIRTH and DEATH, unless one seeks a single word conveying …

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Colloquy Feb 1988

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

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A Tribute To Greatness, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

A Tribute To Greatness, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

More than two millenia have passed since the "brutal" murder of Julius Caesar. Such was the stature of this giant among men, however, that his influence continues to dominate our lives today.

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Mystery Mammals, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Mystery Mammals, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

A form of wordplay antedating the start of the twentieth century, but still alive and well, is that of hidden or buried words. The following sentence, taken from page 31 of the June 1972 issue of the British magazine Games & Puzzles, illustrates the technique:

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The Eternal Feminine, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

The Eternal Feminine, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Careful observers of the word scene have long known that some of the simplest English words can be anagrammed or arranged to form feminine first names. Thus, STINKER is a rearrangement of KRISTEN, the word TOASTER may be transposed into ROSETTA, LEARNED is an anagram of DARLEEN or DARLENE, and INTERNEEDS converts into ERNESTINE. (Parenthetically, the word LEARNED may also be rearranged o form a "masculine" name, LEANDER, but we don't want to think about that just now.)

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Order In A Resistentialist World, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Order In A Resistentialist World, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Earlier in the twentieth century, some French intellectual whose name escapes me now advanced the philosophy of resistialism. The possibly central tenet of this philosophy was the idea that inanimate objects have an intrinsic tendency to resist us, thwarting our objectives. Resistentialism appears to have made little headway in the world, for I do not find the word in my dictionary. Yet, nowhere is the truth of resistetialism more evident than in logological research. As we all know, if we need a word or name to complete some logological structure such as a word square, or a word set exemplifying …

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Singer, Singer!, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Singer, Singer!, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

What well-known singer does the definition "to cross a river" bring to your mind? Why, Tennessee Ernie FORD, of course. similarly, "fish country" suggests Judy GARLAND (= gar + land) and the clue "the evidence: a joint!" enigmatically refers to Rosemary CLOONEY (= clue + knee, in pronunciation).

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The Calligraphic Decalogue, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

The Calligraphic Decalogue, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Western man has always felt the need to find a unifying principle, an underlying uniformity, in terms of which to explain the apparent diversity surrounding him. In logology, the search is on for a sort of universal catalyst - an operation or transformation in which all words and names, regardless of their length or letter constitution, can be subjected, changing them to other words or names. In the larger world of which logology is a part, scientists are trying to identify one tiny particle, of various aggregations and arrangements of which everything in the universe consists.

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A New Approach To Transpositions, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

A New Approach To Transpositions, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Although many words and names are transportable, many more are not, learning a bitter taste in the loglogist's mouth. One way of overcoming the problem in relation to groups of words and names is to adopt the transaddition which includes one extra letter as an acceptable standard of achievement, which the further proviso that each transaddition need not adhere to that standard: all that is necessary is for all members of a group of transadditions to adhere to it is their average. This supplementary condition permits some members of the group to add zero letters, becoming genuine transposals, these being …

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Unbalanced Word Division, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Unbalanced Word Division, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

In an article in the November 1974 Word Ways, Merlin X. Houdini explored and solved the problem of dividing an eight-letter word, ESTHONIA, into 35 different pairs of four-letter words, such as HENS and IOTA, using only Webster's Second Edition as a base of operations.

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Quelque Chose, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Quelque Chose, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Answers And Solutions Feb 1988

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles in this issue.

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Facing The End, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Facing The End, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

If someone were to ask you to name three American communities beginning with the letter Z, could you? Unless you happen to live in one, you might have difficulties, for there are only two cities in the nation with populations exceeding 10,000 and beginning with the letter Z: ZANESVILLE, Ohio and ZION, Illinois. Yet there are many hundreds of communities in the United States beginning with the last letter of the alphabet. While some names occur in a good many states - there are numerous Zions, for example - the actual number of "different" Z names is a figure approaching …

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Mary's Little Anagram, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1988

Mary's Little Anagram, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

May and her little lamb were lipogrammed in August 1969, univocalized in August 1986, and subjected to a variety of other logological indignities in November 1988. Here are six more way in which their story can be tortured, taken from my Word Row article in the January 1977 issue of the British magazine Games & Puzzles. See if you can figure out each modus operandi before reading the explanation at the end of the article.

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Answers And Solutions Feb 1988

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles in this issue.

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Mammal Magic, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

Mammal Magic, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

A curious linguistic phenomenon that has received little attention in recent years is the fact that you can take an ordinary English word, add a letter of your choice to it, scramble all of the letters, and produce the name of some mammal. A few examples of this phenomenon.

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The Abcs Of Logology, Dmitri A. Borgmann Feb 1988

The Abcs Of Logology, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

What are the ABCs of logology? Why, words and names beginning with the letters ABC. Since AB- is a common prefix in English, and a word such as ABCOULOMB is very easy to pronounce, there out to be numerous ABC words and names in English.

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The Effects Of Linguistic And Non-Linguistic Context On The Deictic Interpretation Of Noun Phrases., Daniel George Foster Jan 1988

The Effects Of Linguistic And Non-Linguistic Context On The Deictic Interpretation Of Noun Phrases., Daniel George Foster

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Definite noun phrases (NP's), proper names, and third person pronouns are not consistently interpreted deictically. Furthermore, these three types and first and second person pronouns, or potentially deictic NP's, whether deictic or not, may be interpreted as pertaining to the universe of discourse that each text creates, the situation of writing in which the text is created, or the attitudes of the writer towards the referent of a particular NP. Universe of discourse NP's include generic and descriptive NP's and those deictic in the most basic sense (i.e. those that point within the spatio-temporal field of the world external to …

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The Relevance Of Visual Models In Linguistic Theory And Discourse Analysis., Alan Dee Manning Jan 1988

The Relevance Of Visual Models In Linguistic Theory And Discourse Analysis., Alan Dee Manning

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Five articles explain distinct types of linguistic phenomena with visual perception analogies. Together they give indications of similar cognitive systems underlying language and vision. First, relative numbers of languages with different basic-sentence orders for Subject, Verb, and Object fall in a hierarchy: #SOV $>$ #SVO $>$ #VSO $>$ #VOS $>$ #OVS $>$ #OSV. If syntactic interpretation parallels figure/ground interpretation and semantic form parallels enclosed visual forms then that hierarchy falls out more elegantly than in generative or functionalist explanations. Second, semantic interpretation of English syntactic form (subject NP-tense Aux-predicate VP), is modeled with the Penrose …

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Peter Bellwood's Review Of John Terrell's Prehistory In The Pacific Islands, Peter Bellwood Sep 1987

Peter Bellwood's Review Of John Terrell's Prehistory In The Pacific Islands, Peter Bellwood

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

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All Is Vanity, Faith W. Eckler Aug 1987

All Is Vanity, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

The article on vanity license plates in the November 1986 Word Ways probably generated more reader response than any other article Word Ways ever published. Many readers wrote to send us their favorite specimens. John Henrick of Seattle, Washington sent us a whole published book by John and Barbara Dixon entitled The Plate Book: "Puzzle Plates" The New American Hi-Way Graffiti (Voler Publishing Company, Seattle; 1982), containing approximately 52,000 examples. In preparing this sequel to the first article, I Leaderer of Scarsdale, New York and Vernon MacLaren of Augusta, Maine. The latter pointed out that the subject is properly registration …

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Wordplay In The 19th Century, A. Ross Eckler Aug 1987

Wordplay In The 19th Century, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Modern recreational linguistics, as codified by Dmitri Borgmann in "Language on Vacation" (Scribner's, 1965), primarily views words as collections of letters to be manipulated in various ways, and secondarily as combinations of sounds and carriers of meaning. As in other branches of scholarly inquiry, this narrow focus has enabled today's logologists to see relationships more clearly, to ask new questions, and in general to elucidate the subject to an extent their predecessors could not even comprehend. Yet with such advances come myopia - one sees the individual trees, but no longer the forest. It is extremely instructive to look at …

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Writing On The Wall, Walter Shedlofsky Aug 1987

Writing On The Wall, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

Good afternoon, Lieutenant Jamison. I appreciate your taking off time to see me. I am Lyle Stanton, lawyer for the estate of Malcolm Travis who died three weeks ago.

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 20 Number 4 Aug 1987

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 20 Number 4

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

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Answers And Solutions Aug 1987

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles in this issue.

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