More Charades and Mondegreens

Here is an assortment of my own charades. Children who learn to recite patriotic songs, religious hymns, etc., that they haven\u27t ever read create remarkable mondegreens. Here are some dandies

Amalgamate, Chemist!

When Douglas Hofstadter took over Martin Gardner\u27s column in Scientific American, he changed the name from MATHEMATICAL GAMES to METAMAGICAL THEMAS. The new name is an anagram of the old one, that is, a permutation or reordering of the same set of letters. This naturally suggests the question of how easy it is to find an anagram on these letters which makes sense

The Periodic Table of the Alphabet

If that bearded nineteenth-century Russian, Dmitri Mendelev, had turned his attention to the Science of Linguistics, instead of to the pseudo-scientific cult of Alchemy, then rather than merely discovering the Periodic Table of the Elements, he might have been led to invent the following Periodic Table of the Alphabet

Double Duty Adjectives

Several common English adjectives have two distinct meanings, revealed by clearly distinguishable opposites. Here are several antonym pairs that illustrate this

The Odd Homonym Attack - A New Figure of Speech

Not to be confused with the classical ad hominem attack, our new odd homonym attack consists of replacing the target\u27s actual name with an unflattering homonym. Here are a few examples

A Letter to Martin

A letter to the late Martin Gardner

Extraterrestrial Linguistics

There are two questions involved in communication with Extraterrestrials. One is the mechanical issue of discovering a mutually acceptable channel. The other is the more philosophical problem (semantic, ethic, and metaphysical) of the proper subject matter for discourse. In simpler terms, we first require a common language, and then we must think of something clever to say

Genetic Coding

A mathematician considers the problem of how genetic information is encoded for transmission from parent to offspring