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

All is Vanity

The article on vanity license plates in the November 1986 Word Ways probably generated more reader response than any other article Word Ways ever published. Many readers wrote to send us their favorite specimens. John Henrick of Seattle, Washington sent us a whole published book by John and Barbara Dixon entitled The Plate Book: Puzzle Plates The New American Hi-Way Graffiti (Voler Publishing Company, Seattle; 1982), containing approximately 52,000 examples. In preparing this sequel to the first article, I Leaderer of Scarsdale, New York and Vernon MacLaren of Augusta, Maine. The latter pointed out that the subject is properly registration plates, not license plates, because they relate to the registration of the car, not the owner\u27s ability to drive it

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

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

End Play

You are working on a crossword puzzle and the grid shows _EAR. Without an additional clue you would not know whether the missing letter was a B, D, F, G, H, L, N, P, R, S, T or W. All this proves is that many English words have similar contructions with only one letter different, a fact exploited by certain prize puzzle constructors who devise fiendishly clever puzzles which appear to have two or more correct answers. Only by following their tortuous logic can you divine the acceptable solution

Of Visa For The Mind

We\u27ve all heard the story, possibly apocryphal, about the computer program for language translation which renders The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak into Russian and then back to English as The whiskey is fine but the meat has gone bad. I wondered just how likely it was that such a humorous result would occur and, more importantly, just how useful is such a program for meaningful translation? Using the Lernout & Hauspie Simply Translating program which translates English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish and from those languages back to English, I picked six common aphorisms to test, converting each first to the foreign language and then back to English

A Puzzling Past

The year is 1896. You live on a small farm in upstate New York. The cows have been milked, the pigs slopped, supper eaten and the dishes washed, and you and your wife sit down by the light of a kerosene lamp and several candles to read the latest issue of the weekly newsmagazine, The American Agriculturalist

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