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Q Palindromes, Jeff Grant Nov 1984

Q Palindromes, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The letter Q has always intrigued people. Words like 'bouquet', 'acquiesce' and 'quinquennial' seem to have an almost mystical quality. Formists struggle to include Q in pyramids and squares while pangrammatists always find it the most difficult letter to incorporate into their compositions. Of course the main problem is that the letter Q is almost invariably followed by a U (for exceptions, see the editor's article in the May 1976 Word Ways). This constraint has severely limited the scope of Q in most fields of wordplay, although there are some ingenious examples of its use, such as the amazing …

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Life-Cycle Recycle, Robert Cass Keller Nov 1984

Life-Cycle Recycle, Robert Cass Keller

Word Ways

John Henrick's "Limits of the Human Life Cycle" in the August issue of Word Ways inspired several readers to send in additions, most notably Dmitri Borgmann who supplied over 225 examples. A collection of the best is presented below, arranged according to the type of wordplay used.

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Flora Americana, Edward R. Wolpow Nov 1984

Flora Americana, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

The usual compilation of official state flowers is based upon people's likes and dislikes regarding the plants themselves. We should attempt instead logologist's list - in particular, try to provide an example for the species name of the Latin binomial, for each state. Most names in the list below are taken from H.W. Rickett's Wild Flowers of the United States.

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The Ultimate Homonym Group, Dmitri A. Borgmann Nov 1984

The Ultimate Homonym Group, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Two or more words spelled differently but pronounced the same are called homonyms by logologists. Today's linguistics appears to have no name for such words - homonyms, homophones, and homographs may or even must all be spelled and sounded alike.

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The Apple-Sauce Chronicles, Louis Phillips Nov 1984

The Apple-Sauce Chronicles, Louis Phillips

Word Ways

In his excellent book on formula jokes, Jokes, Paul Dickson comments that What's the Difference? jokes, a blend of conundrum and pun, can be found in very old joke books. Some of the examples below are homonymic in nature; others reverse the first and last parts of the name; yet others are spoonergrams.

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A New Type Of Reference Work, A. Ross Eckler Nov 1984

A New Type Of Reference Work, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Henry Burger's The Wordtree, a 28-year labor of love privately published in August 1984 at 7306 Brittany, Merriam KS 66203 and available from him for $149, is a reference book based on a novel idea: that one can express any transitive verb as the sum of exactly two other transitive verbs, as RAP = HIT + INTERRUPT, or VIBRATE = HANG + WAG. The core of his book consists of a 130-page Hierarchy, in which 24,600 transitives are listed and related to each other according to equations of this nature.

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All Letter-Orders In A Word, A. Ross Eckler Nov 1984

All Letter-Orders In A Word, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the word reiterate, the letters R, E and T appear in all possible orders: REiTerate, ReiTErate, rEiTeRate, rEiteRaTe, reiTERate, and reiTeRatE. This property is not particularly unusual, being shared by thousands of Websterian words. The shortest letter sequences possessing this property are seven letters long.

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Arrow Of Revelation, Walter Shedlofsky Nov 1984

Arrow Of Revelation, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

Interview, Wednesday 11 July, 1000 hours, office of Police Lieutenant Arthur Jamison.

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Kickshaws, Charles W. Bostick Nov 1984

Kickshaws, Charles W. Bostick

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Horsing Around, Leonard R.N. Ashley Nov 1984

Horsing Around, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

Horses were eaten in the Old Stone Age, broken and ridden or used for farm animals in later periods, mounted by knights and hitched to coaches and buggies. Indeed, we still measure power in horsepower. See if you can provide the words defined below, words which give some hint of the immense and long-lasting influence of our equine friends on human vocabulary. If you get all these right, try to make a list of 24 proverbs involving horses, starting with "A horse of a different color," "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride," "A man on a white horse," and …

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Answers And Solutions Nov 1984

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

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Instructions To Authors Nov 1984

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to the publication.

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Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 34, No. 1, Hans Trumpy, William T. Parsons, Marion Lois Huffines, Robert P. Stevenson, Jane Adams Clarke Oct 1984

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 34, No. 1, Hans Trumpy, William T. Parsons, Marion Lois Huffines, Robert P. Stevenson, Jane Adams Clarke

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• American News in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Swiss Almanacs: An Overview
• The Stuff of Which Folksongs are Made: Dialect Poetry of Lina Somer (1862-1932)
• Word Gain and Loss in the English of the Pennsylvania Germans
• The Autograph Album: A Victorian Girl's Best Friend
• Cobwebs on My Mind: Untangling Family Relationships
• Aldes un Neies

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Roger C. Green's Review Of Roger M. Keesing's Kwaio Religion: The Living And The Dead In A Solomon Island Society, Roger C. Green Sep 1984

Roger C. Green's Review Of Roger M. Keesing's Kwaio Religion: The Living And The Dead In A Solomon Island Society, Roger C. Green

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

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Double Entendre Headlines, Eugene Ulrich Aug 1984

Double Entendre Headlines, Eugene Ulrich

Word Ways

While I was calmly reading the newspaper the other day, this headline near the bottom of the page caught my eye: JOHNNY, JUNE CASH ARE HIT IN HUNGARY. Had they been pelted with rotten tomatoes by a restive audience, or with bricks by protestors in the streets? (A modern civilized population has various ways of expressing its feelings.) Or had they been bashed by a car on the highway, or beaned by a meteorite? When I read the article, it was a surprise (and no small relief) to learn that their concerts in Hungary had been a big success.

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A Supplementary Topical Index Aug 1984

A Supplementary Topical Index

Word Ways

The following index has been designed to help the reader locate specific types of wordplay published in 26 issues of Word Ways from February 1978 through May 1984; it updates a similar index for 40 issues of Word Ways from February 1968 through November 1977 appearing in the February 1978 issue. Both indices use the same format: a logological core consisting of (1) letter-patterns in words, (2) operations upon letters in words, and (3) relationships between letters and sounds, and a periphery (the intersection of logology with other branches of wordplay) consisting of (1) literary wordplay and games, (2) academic …

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Front Cover And Publication Information Aug 1984

Front Cover And Publication Information

Word Ways

Publication information including table of contents.

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The Maori Rolls, Jeff Grant Aug 1984

The Maori Rolls, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In New Zealand a general election is held every three years, and it is compulsory for all qualified persons to be registered on an electoral roll. The country is divided up into 75 electorates, each containing about 20,000 eligible voters. There are at present over two million people recorded on the rolls, which are being continually updated to show new electors, changes of address, changes of name by marriage, and so on. The electoral rolls are published in soft-cover book form and can be inspected at most libraries and Post Offices throughout New Zealand. There is a National Microfiche Index …

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Novelty Forms: A Satire, Newton B. Lovejoy Aug 1984

Novelty Forms: A Satire, Newton B. Lovejoy

Word Ways

Late in the last century, forms (solid crossword arrays with various geometrical outlines) were frequently found in puzzle columns in magazines and newspapers. Constructors soon tired of standard outlines such as squares, diamonds and pyramids, and developed a variety of more exotic ones: stars, crosses, pentagons, enneagons, hurglasses and the like. Two hundred and nine different shapes (including minor variants) can, in fact, be found in the 1906 Key to Puzzledom, a guide to the best in word puzzle literature up to that time. Alas, every excess creates its own reaction; the following satire is an abridgement of an …

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Novelty Forms: Two Examples, Walter Shedlofsky Aug 1984

Novelty Forms: Two Examples, Walter Shedlofsky

Word Ways

In the last fifty years, the construction of novelty forms (solid crossword arrays with unusual outlines) has almost died out. Three examples have appeared in previous issues of Word Ways: Palmer Peterson's Hollow Diamond (May 1971) and Armless Man (Feb 1980), and Walter Shedlofsky's Windmill (Aug 1973). (The latter occasionally appears in the Enigma, the monthly publication of the National Puzzler's League.) The two Linking Word Squares forms depicted below are believed to be new. Three is nothing exactly like them in puzzle literature; the closest analogues are the Cushion Square and the Hollow Diamond. Note that all …

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Olympic Roots And Branches, A. Ross Eckler Aug 1984

Olympic Roots And Branches, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the February 1984 Word Ways, Darryl Francis presented a quiz based on words whose letters can be rearranged to form OLYMPIC and one other word. Believing that the Olympics deserve further logological celebration, I present in this article an application of "Word Roots and Branches", described in the August 1979 issue Word Ways. Briefly, a word root consists of a diagram showing how a word can be transdeleted to shorter words in single steps (in a single step transdeletion, one letter is removed from a word and the remainder rearranged to form a new word). For many …

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The Middle Of An Alphabetic List, Alan Frank Aug 1984

The Middle Of An Alphabetic List, Alan Frank

Word Ways

What's the middle of the alphabet? It's HA to a cryptic crossword aficionado, and M or N by strict counting, but what if you look in the middle of a reference book? The answer depends a lot on which book you choose. Here are fifty examples.

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Colloquy Aug 1984

Colloquy

Word Ways

Webster's Dictionary defines colloquy as mutual discourse. Readers are encouraged to submit additions, corrections, and comments about earlier articles appearing in Word Ways. Comments received up to a month prior to publication of an issue will appear in it.

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Curiously Concealed Cities, Dmitri A. Borgmann Aug 1984

Curiously Concealed Cities, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

Interested examination discloses that many well-known English words and phrases contain the names of equally well-known cities, either American or foreign. Embedded in the word DRAINAGE, for example, is READING (Pennsylvania), its letters rearranged and an A added. In the same way, the phrase AN OBLONG disguises BOLOGNA (Italy), the single letter added here being an N.

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Peripatetic Words, Maxey Brooke Aug 1984

Peripatetic Words, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

English is perhaps the most mongrel of languages; Spanish and Swahili are the nearest runners-up. Unlike the French, who try to keep their language pure, the English gloat in this mongrelization. In the beginning they had foreign words imposed upon them by conquerors. They have borrowed words from practically every language in Europe except Lithuanian. They have borrowed words from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Polynesia. They have compounded many of these words without regard to their origin (automobile, for example, is a Greek-Latin compound), and they are continuously inventing new words like xerox, googol and blurb …

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The Letter Rebus (Part 3), A. Ross Eckler Aug 1984

The Letter Rebus (Part 3), A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

This article continues the survey of the letter rebus begun in the February 1984 Word Ways; readers should refer to that issue for a general discussion including taxonomy.

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Kickshaws, Edward R. Wolpow Aug 1984

Kickshaws, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Kickshaws is currently being assembled by a series of guest editors. All contributions should be sent to the editor in Morristown, New Jersey.

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A Tale Of Two Crossword Dictionaries, William Sunners Aug 1984

A Tale Of Two Crossword Dictionaries, William Sunners

Word Ways

Ever since the American mania for crossword puzzles began with the publication of the first crossword puzzle book in 1924, many authors have compiled crossword dictionaries as an aid to the harassed solver. I have collected many of these books during the past sixty years, but until recently never tried to infer anything about the sources these authors used from a comparison of their entries with other works.

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Limits Of The Human Life Cycle, John Henrick Aug 1984

Limits Of The Human Life Cycle, John Henrick

Word Ways

The cosmetology of cliches is commonly regarded as an art not so much black as dismal, comparable to the refurbishment of rubbish. Yet, when the underlying concept of the cliche is sufficiently fundamental and compelling, it is not unusual for a phrase that has grown contemptible through familiarity to be reconditioned in popular usage with the aid of such standard devices as metonymy, metaphor, alliteration and rhyme.

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More Tetragram Permutations, Tom Pulliam Aug 1984

More Tetragram Permutations, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

In the May 1984 issue of Word Ways, the editor presented Websterian words containing tetragrams consisting of all 24 permutations of the letter-sets AIRT, AIST, and AGIR. He commented "there may be additional letter-sets that can be fully permuted into tetragram-embeddable Websterian words" because of the incomplete nature of the Thomas-Kassler-Wooley legal tetragram list. Indeed there are; I exhibit below three more tetragram permutations.

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