Doctor Jones and the Lawless Lords of Logomycin

Unable to draw his real foes into the open, Doctor Jones crosses swords directly with a Sinister Logological Entity which threatens the financial health of his entire Medical Empire

The Vocabularyclept Poem, No. 1

Mr. Lindon has solved the VC poem presented in the previous issue - and he has done this under further handicaps, the cause of which was my carelessness in presenting the problem to him. How he finally arrived at a technically exact solution under these conditions is a story in itself. The following passages from his letter make fascinating reading

Polyomino Word-Puzzle Results

In our last issue we presented a near-solution to one of the pentomino word-problems. Now J.A. Lindon has arrived at the first complete solution to one of these problems, which we present at the end of this article. At the same time, Donald A. Drury, who provides (below) suggestions for solving some lower order trimino problems, has written to point out, concerning all these polyomino word-problems: To make the reflection a new problem, you must rule out using the same words in any diagram as were used in its reflected opposite. Otherwise, by simply using the same words in reverse order, top to bottom, you can solve both Rotation X and Reflection X

APPLICATIONS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL THEORY

Experiments and studies were conducted to investigate the role of social capital. Social capital (relationship to others) is a productive asset which is a substitute for and complement to other productive assets. The productivity of social capital leads to the expectation that firms and individuals invest in relationships. Data were collected to answer the following questions: Does the identity (relationship) of trading partners affect selling and buying prices; the acceptance of catastrophic risk; the choice of share or cash leases in agriculture; loan approval; and the banks investment to retain customers? The evidence is in the affirmative.Behavioral economics, Institutional economics, Social capital, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Charade Swifties

In the August 1969 Kickshwas, Dave Silverman pointed out that the Tom Swiftie, a parlour game of several years ago, is not yet extinct. Most readers of Word Ways are familiar with the standard Swiftie

CBB Words

The historical beginnings of the subject treated by Mr. Lindon in this essay may be of interest to readers. Several years ago, Ben Rogers noticed that the word LOGOLOGY possessed a certain simple property of alphabetical balance (see section twenty-nine of Dmitri Borgmann\u27s Beyond Language, published by Charles Scribner\u27s Sons), and communicated this to Dmitri Borgmann who subsequently found many more such words. Mr. Borgmann mentioned the matter to Mr. Lindon in a letter, but was vague on the subject, and Mr. Lindon, whose fertile mind was thus primed with only the shadowy notion that some words have some kind of balance, conceived and worked out a much more complex idea - that of centrally balanced beam-words

Skewling Makes It Plain

Too often, resumed Skewling, things are not made sufficiently plain. He had been talking about the logic of language and had temporarily fallen silent, lost in his thoughts. I too had thoughts. For one thing, a gnat had settled on my nose; and for another, a very dishy au pair girl -- Swedish, blonde and bustily vital -- had come to stay with the Pickerings, and their bathroom window is directly opposite that of our spare room. Nora had not yet cottoned on to the reason behind my sudden passion for interior decorating, but she was becoming suspicious

The Mangled Raven

Editor\u27s Note: The following introduction to the Automynorcagrammatical Raven is taken from a letter from JAL to Howard Bergerson, himself a contributor of a similar construction to Word Ways in November 1975. In an Automynorcagram, the initial letters of the successive words repeat the original message

Homophones

Possibly some other term may be in use for this particular verbal ploy, but for the purpose of this article I define a homophone as a word, phrase, sentence or passage in general whose sound is such that it may be written down and interpreted as regards meaning two distinct ways. There is an obvious overlapping here with homonyms and charades, but the former term is really suitable for single words only, while the latter is certainly applied (see, for example, Dmitri Borgmann\u27s Language on Vacation, p. 112) to passages having the same sequence of letters differently grouped, irrespective of pronunciation

Playing About With Word Squares

Applying ideas to small squares is more fun than trying to construct large ones. In this article I have collected and commented on a number of such ideas, limiting myself to squares of the fifth order. I hope readers may find my results both interesting and stimulating. All ideas used can of course be applied equally well to squares of other orders