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Colloquy May 1982

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 that issue.

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The Highest-Scoring Scrabble Game, Kyle Corbin May 1982

The Highest-Scoring Scrabble Game, Kyle Corbin

Word Ways

What is the highest possible score achievable in a SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game (hereafter referred to simply as a Scrabble game)? This question has intrigued Word Ways readers for ten years.

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Epic Error Recipe, Jeff Grant May 1982

Epic Error Recipe, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

The following palindromic trialogue was initially inspired by J.A. Lindon's classic 'In Eden, I' which appeared in the November 1970 issue of Word Ways.

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Naomi, I Moan, Chaim Fleischman May 1982

Naomi, I Moan, Chaim Fleischman

Word Ways

In this quiz the answer to each clue is a palindrome; to aid in the solution, word-divisions and all vowels are given. The first letters of all thirteen palindromes will spell out another palindrome when read from top to bottom. Answers are given in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

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Emesis Nemesis: Naming Butterflies, Edward R. Wolpow May 1982

Emesis Nemesis: Naming Butterflies, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Emesis nemesis: a pretty word symmetry, suggesting the name of a nostrum to prevent vomiting. It is, instead, the Latin name of a little Texas butterfly. H.L. Lewis's Butterflies of the World boasts color photographs of more than 5,000 of the lovely creatures. Most of the book does consist of these color plates, and at the bottom of each page are the scientific (genus and species) names. The Latin words encountered form a fitting counterpoint to the fascination of the photographs. If a living being happens to belong to a notorious genus, that name appears as a bold entry in …

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Rubberneck: An Overlooked Word, Giles Zimmer May 1982

Rubberneck: An Overlooked Word, Giles Zimmer

Word Ways

Often when children are exposed to a word for the first time, the instance of its use is so vivid that the word is indelibly impressed upon the memory. There are many words which, though no longer used today, I still remember because of experiences associated with the words. This is true for the word "rubberneck". I remember, as a child, how I used to lift up the phone receiver, only to hear the familiar accusation of "rubberneck, rubberneck". This was a fairly common experience for me and, I am sure, for many others who inadvertently blundered into a conversation …

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-Omancy Fancy: A Divination Guide, Paul Hellweg May 1982

-Omancy Fancy: A Divination Guide, Paul Hellweg

Word Ways

In Gregory Benford's novel, In the Ocean of Night, one of the characters asks her husband for the daily horoscope. The husband, apparently bored with the daily horoscope routine, offers to "nip out for a small goat, put him to the knife and give ... a prognosis". Such, he believes, is a more gutsy form of fortune-telling. Ineed.

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Every Tom, Dick And Harry, Leonard R.N. Ashley May 1982

Every Tom, Dick And Harry, Leonard R.N. Ashley

Word Ways

Here, from the world of sports, jazz musicians, policemen, shoe salesmen and the general public who create the lively slanguage of Americans, are some easy and some not-so-easy "characters" for you to identify. If you get most of them, consider yourself to be something of an expert on slang in the land of Uncle Sam. We all know that levis come from the jeans manufactured by the Levi Strauss Company. What is the meaning of each of the following slang terms involving proper names? Answers will be found in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

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A Friendly Alphabet, Alan Frank May 1982

A Friendly Alphabet, Alan Frank

Word Ways

In a recent communication, the editor suggested to me that the standard alphabet isn't very friendly; adjacent letters don't get along well. For example, there is no word in NI containing all four of the letters WXYZ. I have found a way to rearrange the alphabet so that any group of six adjacent letters can be found in a word. THe procedure was two-fold: select a group of long words which contain several uncommon letters which may then be bunched together in the final alphabet, and then use common sense to link them together with vowels and other common letters. …

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Deletions, But No Change In Meaning, William Sunners May 1982

Deletions, But No Change In Meaning, William Sunners

Word Ways

While teaching school in bygone years, I frequently constructed educational word games based on Dmitri Borgmann's entertaining column, Word Row, appearing in Books Magazine (1966) and the Puzzle Lovers Newspaper (1968-71). One of his columns discussed Kangaroo Words: words concealed or contained in longer, synonymous words. For example, NURSED appears correctly spelled out in NoURiShED, and FACE is a shorter version of FACadE; many more were exhibited in Language on Vacation and a long list was developed by Tom PUlliam in the May 1976 issue of Word Ways.

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Loud Screams, Jezebel Q. Xixx May 1982

Loud Screams, Jezebel Q. Xixx

Word Ways

The November 1973 issue of Word Ways included an interesting article about the wordplay of James Thurber. The article cited an observation made by Thurber that a startling affinity or antipathy exists between the letters C and M, when those letters occur as the first letters of words or names. Examples mentioned in the article included CAT and MOUSE, MALICE and CHARITY, and CHAMBERLAIN and MUNICH.

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Kickshaws, Darryl Francis May 1982

Kickshaws, Darryl Francis

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Compression Of English Text, A. Ross Eckler May 1982

Compression Of English Text, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Information theorists maintain that typical English-language text is approximately 75 per cent predictable; for example, in a text-reconstruction experiment carried out by Claude Shannon, a subject presented with various incomplete sentences was able to guess the next letter correctly in 79 out of 102 attempts. However, if one attempts to retain the sense of a sentence after weeding out letters according to some predetermined rule, one cannot achieve such an extreme limit; in fact, the removal of even half the text is likely to introduce severe difficulties. Although Shannon cites an experiment in which six subjects restored an average of …

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Tennessee's Sleeveless Pepperette, Robert Cass Keller May 1982

Tennessee's Sleeveless Pepperette, Robert Cass Keller

Word Ways

Shortly after Howard Bergerson resigned from the editorship of Word Ways, eh wrote to tell me of his latest logological discovery: PEPPERETTE, a word containing four of one letter, three of a second letter, two of a third letter, and one of a fourth letter. According to the 1969 Britannica Yearbook, a pepperette is "a girl who does a dance routine during an intermission at an athletic contest". Although the word fills an obvious gap, it doesn't seem to have caught on; in the intervening 12 years, I have never seen it used, nor does it appear in the 1971 …

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Answers And Solutions May 1982

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

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Back Cover May 1982

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover of this issue, including instructions to authors.

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Fallacia Consequentis, Judy Tucker May 1982

Fallacia Consequentis, Judy Tucker

Word Ways

"If you're driving into town," our dinner party hostess offered helpfully, "there's a parking lot right on the corner of my blog."

Egads! I thought later: she had said that the parking lot would be there if we chose to drive into town. But what if we decided to take the train? Would that entire concrete slab filled with cars suddenly vanish?

I never did find out because we drove to the dinner party that night. But this was the beginning of my obsession with a somewhat common case of poor construction or illogical deduction.

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Ivan's Letter (Part 2), Erik Bodin May 1982

Ivan's Letter (Part 2), Erik Bodin

Word Ways

Exactly sixty minutes later he was back, carrying a bundle.

"Found anything?" he greeted Drummond.

"Everything," was the return.

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Cornundrums, Lynn Louis Lazerson, Barbara Hunt Lazerson May 1982

Cornundrums, Lynn Louis Lazerson, Barbara Hunt Lazerson

Word Ways

Many English words begin with CON. These letters can be replaced by CORN without significantly altering either the pronunciation or the appearance of the words.
The answers to the following riddles require the substitution of CORN for CON in some everyday terms. In order to answer the riddles correctly, one need only be able to pretend that cornstalks engage in activities similar to those that occupy the time and attention of people.

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Non-Crashing Word Sets, Jeff Grant May 1982

Non-Crashing Word Sets, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In a December 1981 letter, the editor of Word Ways proposed the following challenge:

The September/October 1981 issue of Games magazine sponsored a contest to find the maximum number of four-letter mutually non-crashing words in boldface in Webster's Third (or inferred plurals of boldface). To my surprise, the winner came up with 21 words: abbe, baff, cleg, djin, eddy, frum, gnaw, huzz, isn't, jowl, Kthu, Lvov, myth, Omsk, PFCs, repp, skyr, Tchi, upgo, vild, Xtra. I'm now wondering if, with all the weird spellings in the OED, whether that dictionary might be used as a single source to equal or …

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Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 15 Number 1 Feb 1982

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 15 Number 1

Word Ways

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

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Ivan's Letter (Part 1), Erik Bodin Feb 1982

Ivan's Letter (Part 1), Erik Bodin

Word Ways

The following cipher puzzle appeared in the May 1930 issue of The Enigma, the official publication of the National Puzzlers League. Erik Bodin offered a $10 to the first person to discover the secret message in Ivan's letter, hinting only that the letter encoded "the name of a point to be attacked, the date of the attack, and the troops involved". The cipher is unquestionably difficult; according to a brief not in the October 1930 Enigma, no one ever solved the puzzle. In the original article, the letter is presented in handwritten form; the slightly modified typewritten version given below …

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Single-Letter Surnames, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1982

Single-Letter Surnames, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

For the logologist, the study of American surnames is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because there are 1.3 million different names now in existence, frustrating because there is no single reference work listing them. The nearest approximation to a reference work is the telephone directory, but the search for a rare name there can be a tedious one: there are thousands of different directories, and most of the smaller ones contain separate alphabetical listings for each town or telephone exchange. And, alas, most names are rare -- Social Security records in 1974 indicate that about 450,000 surnames were held by …

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Distill It, Sid, Chaim Fleischman Feb 1982

Distill It, Sid, Chaim Fleischman

Word Ways

In this quiz the answer to each clue is a palindrome; to aid in the solution, word-divisions and all vowels are given. The first letters of all thirteen palindromes will spell out another palindrome when read from top to bottom. Answers are given in Answers and Solutions at the end of the issue.

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Falalalala-Lala-La-La, Edward R. Wolpow Feb 1982

Falalalala-Lala-La-La, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

Honolulu Lulu lullabied her baby and greeted the elderly lady from Nassau, "Whom may you be?"

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Who Done It?, Frank A. Magary Feb 1982

Who Done It?, Frank A. Magary

Word Ways

Hans Sten, president of the firm of Sten, Willems, and Milsap, is found dead at his desk by his housekeeper, Mrs. Lehr. Police established that he died of slow poisoning from something in his after-dinner coffee. Being a puzzle fanatic, and a devoted reader of Word Ways, Hans could not resist leaving a puzzle to reveal the identity of his murderer.

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The Most One-Sided Scrabble Game, Prince Joli Kansil Feb 1982

The Most One-Sided Scrabble Game, Prince Joli Kansil

Word Ways

In the August 1981 issue of Word Ways, Alan Frank presented several ultra-low-scoring Scrabble games. This article follows up by asking: what is the widest disparity of score possible between two players? Below is a set-up game I created years ago in which the difference in scores is more than 1900; however, I am sure avid Scrabblers can improve on this number. All of the words can be found in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (Second Edition).

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Colloquy Feb 1982

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 that issue.

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English Field Names, Jay Ames Feb 1982

English Field Names, Jay Ames

Word Ways

England is an onomastician's paradise: over the years, detailed studies of many different kinds of English names have been compiled and published. English place names have been previously discussed in Word Ways; in addition, it has reviewed books of house names, surnames and personal nicknames. But did you know that the English have also made a practice of naming all the pieces of land forming part of the agrarian economy of a village? These 'field names', as they are called, have been quite thoroughly documented by the appropriately-named John Field in English Field Names: A Dictionary, issued in many …

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Creating Consonant Strings, Maxey Brooke Feb 1982

Creating Consonant Strings, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

In Dave Silverman's list of abstemious words in the February 1972 Kickshaws, the most abstemious was CRWTH (pronounced 'crooth'). For those of you who don't know, an abstemious word is one without vowels.

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