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Single And Double Transposal Squares, A. Ross Eckler May 1980

Single And Double Transposal Squares, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

A transposal square is a square array of letters in which each row and column can be rearranged to form a word. Philip Cohen introduced the concept to Word Ways readers in his November 1979 Kickshaws, presenting there a 10-by-10 double transposal square (ten distinct letter-combinations arrangeable into words in the rows, and ten additional distinct letter-combinations arrangeable into words in the columns). This article exhibits a 12-by-12 double transposal square produced by his construction method, as well as an 11-by-11 single transposal square.

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The Case Of The Clean Limerick, John Mcclellan May 1980

The Case Of The Clean Limerick, John Mcclellan

Word Ways

It will come as somewhat of a surprise to some people that such a thing as a clean limerick exists -- the Rabelaisian voice of naughtiness drowns out the weaker voice of its cleanlier brother and almost completely dominates the field. The purpose of this short paper is to point out that clean limericks not only do exist but that they can be quite good; and to suggest means by which they can be recast with certain bawdy overtones, without sacrificing their purity, and thereby appeal more to man's natural rambunctiousness. This popularization process we may call 'pseudo-pornographizing'. It is …

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On The Inter(E)State, Philip M. Cohen May 1980

On The Inter(E)State, Philip M. Cohen

Word Ways

Three Word Ways articles have been written by Dmitri Borgmann (February and May 1977) and Pamela Brang (August 1977) to support the proposition that 'all words are interesting' from a logological standpoint. As noted in the May and August Colloquies, the results left something to be desired. For example, Borgmann's efforts included two transposals and a substitute-letter transposal to nonexistent words or names; a reference to a 'dictionary combination' (a sequence of words occurring somewhere in the text of a dictionary, no more worth mention than any sequence from any other text); and a reference to a different word ('subcontinent' …

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Front Cover And Publication Information May 1980

Front Cover And Publication Information

Word Ways

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

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An Early French Book Of Wordplay, A. Ross Eckler, Faith W. Eckler May 1980

An Early French Book Of Wordplay, A. Ross Eckler, Faith W. Eckler

Word Ways

In the Kickshaws section of the May 1979 Word Ways, Will Shortz described a 1616 book of French wordplay by Etienne Tabourot, entitled Les Bigarrures et Touches du Seigneur des Accords (The Designs and Strokes of the Lord of Harmony), hereafter denoted by B-T. This book is believed to be the first one in the world entirely devoted to recreational linguistics. Of this work one nineteenth-century reviewer has written "This is a curious collection whose author has been pleased to temper his erudition with numerous pleasantries, sometimes good, sometimes bad and often smutty."

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Colloquy May 1980

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.

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Alphabetic Transadditions, Jeff Grant May 1980

Alphabetic Transadditions, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

In the May 1972 Kickshaws, Dave Silverman reported on efforts by mary Hazard, Gary Crum and Murray Pearce to select a four-letter word, add in turn each letter from A through Z, and rearrange to form 26 five-letter words. These alphabetic transadditions left something to be desired, using plurals such as QERES ('qere' is a marginal instruction in the Hebrew Bible to substitute one fowel for another), possessives such as EZER'S (Ezer is a Biblical personage), and words such as QADER (not in any of my dictionaries).

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Palindromes: The Ascending Tradition, Dmitri A. Borgmann May 1980

Palindromes: The Ascending Tradition, Dmitri A. Borgmann

Word Ways

The accessibility of the palindrome in ancient times to the lands east and south-east of the Mediterranean implies evidence that its intrigues as a language form antedate the Romance language family and were operant in a murkier, and far more remote, period.

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Agamemnon Words, Edward R. Wolpow May 1980

Agamemnon Words, Edward R. Wolpow

Word Ways

The name Agamemnon is composed of three consecutive sets of three letters in which the first and third letters in each triplet is the same. There are a handful of such words in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (Second or Third Editions): AGAMEMNON, MIMULUSES, ILICACAEAE, SUSUHUNAN, COCCACEAE and the doubtful MIMICISMS ("morbid tendencies to mimicry"). A search for analogous twelve-letter words in Levine's pattern word lists proved unsuccessful, although a few one-letter misses did surface: IMITATRESSES, IRIDODONESIS (and its listed plural), VIVIDIALYSIS (and its inferred plural).

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Double Reverse Play, Helen Gunn, Richard E. Douglass May 1980

Double Reverse Play, Helen Gunn, Richard E. Douglass

Word Ways

When we were children, many of us went through a phase -- much to the dismay and embarrassment of our parents -- of reciting everything backward. Every so often, this practice would unearth a genuine reversal: live/evil, doom/mood, straw/warts. The following phrases define both words in a series of two word reversals; the length of each word is given in parenthesis. Be warned: some clues are straightforward, but others are obscure. Answers can be found at the end of this issue.

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Clipt, Maxey Brooke May 1980

Clipt, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

Among the twenty or so ways that new words enter our language is clipping. Clipping, the opposite of affixing, forms a new word by eliminating part of a complex or compound word. Usually the meaning is not changed.

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Superulltramegalosesquipedalia, A. Ross Eckler May 1980

Superulltramegalosesquipedalia, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Recently, Jeff Grant of Hastings, New Zealand supplied the editor with the full 3641-letter name of the protein Bovine Glutamate Dehydrogenase, as constructed from the amino acid residue sequence shown in The Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure (1973), Volume 5, Supplement 1, published by The National Biomedical Research Foundation. Although this word has been cited by the Guinness Book of Records since 1976 as the longest word known, it was never written out in full there, nor has it apparently been published anywhere else.

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Kickshaws, Charles W. Bostwick May 1980

Kickshaws, Charles W. Bostwick

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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Answers And Solutions May 1980

Answers And Solutions

Word Ways

Answers and solutions to the puzzles contained in this issue.

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Back Cover May 1980

Back Cover

Word Ways

Back cover, including instructions for authors wishing to contribute to the publication.

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Reversible Word Ladders, Tom Pulliam May 1980

Reversible Word Ladders, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

In the February 1979 Kickshaws, the late R. Robinson Rowe proposed Word Ladders which successfully reverse the letters of a given word. To judge from the discussion there, he actually found only two examples of four-letter reversals.

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Three-Letter Hex-Words, A. Ross Eckler May 1980

Three-Letter Hex-Words, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

It is well known that hexagons can be used to tile a flat surface with no space left over. If letters are inscribed in the hexagons, a three-letter word can be formed by a set of three hexagons meeting at a common point. No rearrangement of letters is necessary; the word can always be spelled out by going either clockwise or counterclockwise around the point. Because this property does not hold for square tiling (four-letter words) or triangular tiling (six-letter words), hexagonal tiling is uniquely suited for the various letter patterns we described in this article.

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Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 29, No. 3, William T. Parsons, Mary Shuler Heimburger, J. Howard Fenstermacher, Amos Long Jr., A. Russell Slagle, John R. Costello Apr 1980

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 29, No. 3, William T. Parsons, Mary Shuler Heimburger, J. Howard Fenstermacher, Amos Long Jr., A. Russell Slagle, John R. Costello

Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine

• Shuler Family Correspondence
• Vestiges of the Markley Family
• 30 Years of the Kutztown Folk Festival: A Photo Essay
• The Rural Village
• Father of the Fraternity: Christopher Schlegel and Rosicrucianism
• A Lexical Comparison of Two Sister Languages: Pennsylvania German and Yiddish
• Aldes un Neies

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Letter-Frequencies In Car Names, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1980

Letter-Frequencies In Car Names, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

At a regional meeting of the National Puzzlers' League held at Kingston, New Jersey in November 1979, Arthur K. Harris presented a word game in which participants were asked to add C, A, and R to groups of letters and rearrange these to form car names. The purpose of this article is to guage the extent car-namers may have favored these three letters; do they appear more often than in a random selection of dictionary words?

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Biographical Link-O-Grams, Boris Randolph Feb 1980

Biographical Link-O-Grams, Boris Randolph

Word Ways

If Geographical Link-O-Grams, why not Biographical ones, too? The following words link the first and last names of 60 well-known people; fill in the blanks with letters to complete. Answers are in Answers and Solutions at the end of this issue.

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Shiftgrams, Tom Pulliam Feb 1980

Shiftgrams, Tom Pulliam

Word Ways

Take a word (for example, MUSIC), shift each letter n steps along the alphabet arranged in a circle with A following Z (for example, M eight steps to U, U eight steps to C, S eight steps to A, I eight steps to Q, C eight steps to K), and rearrange the resulting letters to form another word (for example, UCAQK to QUACK). Howard Bergerson, writing under a pseudonym, christened QUACK a shiftgram of MUSIC in "Sea-Changed Words" in the February 1969 Word Ways. Multiple shiftgrams are possible; however, the theoretical maximum of 26 shiftgrams of a word is impossible …

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Limerick-Gimerick, Maxey Brooke Feb 1980

Limerick-Gimerick, Maxey Brooke

Word Ways

It has been claimed that the limerick is the only fixed poetry form indigenous to the English language. This may or may not be true. In his book The Limerick (Bell Publishing Co., New York, 1964), a collection of very blue limericks, G. Legman traces the origin of the verse form back to the very beginnings of Anglo-Saxon literature. Most of his illustrations are rather forced.

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Platonic Relationships, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1980

Platonic Relationships, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In the November 1978 Kickshaws, Harry and Mary Hazard presented a word game in which two players alternately label with letters the vertices of a cube, each player's object being to form words encircling the square faces and block the other player from doing this. The game suggested the following challenge: label the vertices of each of the five Platonic solids with letters of the alphabet, none repeated, so that words can be formed out of the letters assigned to the vertices of each face.

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Palmer Peterson, Master Formist, Philip M. Cohen Feb 1980

Palmer Peterson, Master Formist, Philip M. Cohen

Word Ways

The following article is my abridgement of one written as a National Puzzlers' League memorial to Palmer Peterson, who died in June 1979 at the age of 77. Few present-day word buffs are aware of the enormous work that went into the construction of giant forms in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of the precursors of the crossword puzzle, forms are mini-crosswords of regular shape with no black squares.

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The Sator Square Revisited, Harry B. Partridge Feb 1980

The Sator Square Revisited, Harry B. Partridge

Word Ways

In the November 1979 Word Ways there was an interesting challenging article by Dmitri A. Borgmann called "Palindromes: The Rotas Square."

I was glad to see the Master Logologist return to the problem of the Sator square, about which he said in his Language on Vacation (p. 208), "The treatment we have given the 'Sator' square is far from adequate, partly for lack of space, partly because we don't happen to care for it ...."

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Word Squares Using Many Letters, Jeff Grant Feb 1980

Word Squares Using Many Letters, Jeff Grant

Word Ways

What is the largest number of different letters that can be used in a word square? For word squares of size three, many are known which employ nine different letters; the editor suggests that the one at the right uses the commonest words.

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Soup To Nuts: A Poe-Puree Of Puns, Fred Abrams Feb 1980

Soup To Nuts: A Poe-Puree Of Puns, Fred Abrams

Word Ways

In Poe's awesome tale of vengeance, the narrator Montresor reveals to the reader the circumstances which prompted him to commit a perfect crime 50 years before: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge." On the pretext of having Fortunato sample some newly acquired Amontillado, Montresor had enticed him into the vaults beneath his castle. There the inebriated Fortunato was taken by surprise, chained into a crypt, and and walled up alive with mortar and stone. Poe, a clever punster, scattered many puns throughout his tales. Following …

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Internal Tautonyms, A. Ross Eckler Feb 1980

Internal Tautonyms, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

In "Alfalfa and All That" in the November 1978 Word Ways, Leroy F. Meyers presented a variety of English and foreign words containing unhyphenated internal tautonyms. This article extends his work by classifying internal tautonyms in two ways -- by the repetition period, and by the length of the tautonymic part.

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On Again, Off Again, Leonard R. N. Ashley Feb 1980

On Again, Off Again, Leonard R. N. Ashley

Word Ways

Here are fifty idioms you can work on, easy once you catch onto the fact that each one is on about a phrase in which the word ON is featured. Go on, try it ...

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Kickshaws, Richard Lederer Feb 1980

Kickshaws, Richard Lederer

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

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