Slub Glub

Fun and games in a logological family. From time immemorial we have deliberately mispronounced words. An example of this is the word agenda where we always emphasize the first syllable and use a hard g. We use this word often as in What\u27s today\u27s agenda? In their words, what are the planned activities for today? I have to remember to pronounce the word correctly when I\u27m in the real world, lest I be thought ignorant

Playing Jotto Against a Computer

The November 1989 Word Ways reviewed Recreational Mathemagical Software (Clarks Summit PA) designed for playing the game of Jotto with a computer. In the two-person game of Jotto, each person selects a five-letter target word; the object is to guess your opponent\u27s word before he guesses yours. To identify his target word, you propose a sequence of five-letter words, and your opponent tells you how many letters of the guess word are in his target word. For example, if the target word is PIVOT, THOSE scores 2 (T,O match) and MUNCH, 0. You and your opponent agree beforehand on a dictionary of allowable guess and target words (the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is useful here)

Biblical Colors

In Touch Blue , Maxey Brooke is not quite fair to the writers of the Bible by attributing to them a measure of color-blindness for never mentioning that the sky is blue. To begin with, he asserts that the sky is mentioned more than 400 times in the Bible when in fact the word sky or skies appears only eleven times. More common (and undoubtedly what he had in mind) is heaven . However, this word in its Biblical usage usually connotes a realm -- the abode of God or of the souls of the faithful departed -- rather than a canopy over the earth, and hence would have no color

Kickshaws

A collection of linguistic kickshaws assembled by a guest editor

The Electronic Speller

I recently bought a new typewriter--one of those super-duper electronic marvels which does everything but slice bread. Among its many features is a built-in 50,000-word dictionary against which I can check the spelling of words, either as I type them or after and press the space bar, the machine will beep angrily at me and I will have two options: either I can press the space bar again, in which case the machine will reluctantly type the word as I spelled it (probably laughing quietly to itself at my idiocy), or I can ask the machine to search its dictionary and suggest words that I might have been trying to write

Vanity of Vanities

I happened to be driving down the road recently when a bright red sports car went by bearing the vanity license plate 4 MY EGO. Then and there came a dazzling revelation: the whole subject of vanity license plates as a vehicle for wordplay has recieved very little attention from logologists

Kickshaws

A collection of linguistic kickshaws

On Searching for Three-L Lamas

It is a generally accepted premise in logology that English words do not contain triplets of the same letter. As Ogden Nash points out, one does not expect to encounter English words containing LLL - or, for that matter, EEE or SSS. Recently, I had occasion to pursue a listing of tetragrams derived from the Second Edition of Webster\u27s International Unabridged Dictionary and found that these triplets apparently do occur in English words

A Type of Crypt

It had been a bad week at the CIA. Tensions were building in the Middle East, and unrest was spreading throughout the United States, particularly on college campuses. Young student terrorists were threatening to bomb government offices, and the President was considering declaring a national emergency and calling out the National Guard

Borgmann: The Man Behind The Legend

Dmitri Borgmann has been called the Father of Logology--a term he coined to describe recreational wordplay as a distinguished from academic linguistics. His two books, Language on Vacation (1965) and Beyond Language (1967), have become classics in the field. In 1968 Greenwood Press selected him as Word Ways\u27 first editor