Famous Last Anagrams

Deathbed utterances of famous people are sometimes recorded for posterity and generally contain the last spark of wisdom before they go to greet the great Anagrammatist in the Sky. Who could forget Madame de Pompadour\u27s bon mot to a priest at her bedside Stay a little longer and we will go together or Bredan Behan\u27s remark to the obliging nun Bless you, Sister. May you be the mother of a bishop ? In fact many of these gems are apocryphal or said while the notable enjoyed good health. His or her very last Rhodes\u27 dictum So much to do, so little time was not his final message but rather Turn me over, Jack which isn\u27t particularly quotable at after-dinner speeches

Famous Scrabble Quotes

Some famous people have dabbled in Scrabble: Richard Burton, King Farouk, Omar Sharif, President Nixon and Martina Navratilova; to name a few. But there are many other celebrities who, in the course of a game, have uttered immortal comments which have since become part and parcel of the Scrabble player\u27s vernacular

Transdeletion Nests in Chambers

Successive transdeletions by a single letter from word to word yield a pyramidic structure, as demonstrated by Ross Eckler in Two New Transdeletion Pyramids in the May Word Ways. What if we progressively delete all letters of a single word and transpose the remainder

Medical Curiosities

Anybody infected by the humour of Ash and Lake\u27s Bizzare Books (particularly Chapter 2, The Right Person for the job ) will be continually on the lookout for similar bibliographic anomalies. Working in a medical library, I have developed the habit of collecting references in which the author\u27s name fits like a surgical glove onto the title of his work

Scrabble in Nursery Rhyme

There was an old woman who hid in her shoe Some esses for gaining a point (sometimes, two). SHe sneaked them in one at a time And no one detected the crime -- But when she played SASSAFRAS, SISSY and SMILES, Her opponent demanded a recount of titles

Groucho Plays Scrabble

It was in the summer of 1952 that HOllywood discovered Scrabble

A Day At The You Knighted Nay Shuns

It was a chilly afternoon on December the seventh, 1967, the 26th anniversary of Pearl Harbour. Dmitri Borgmann was sitting in the reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He had come down from Oak Park, Illinois for a few days to do research on synonyms for baldness after noticing that his hairline was receding

Nomen Est Ominous

There have been 23 Prime Ministers of Australia since Federation in 1901. Eighteen of their surnames (and twenty of their Christian names) satisfy Dmitri Borgmann\u27s ultimate logological law, the requirement that all designations...begin with letters in the first half of the English alphabet ( History Reinterpreted , Word Ways February 1987)

WYSIWYG Words For Scrabble Players

The Swiss author Max Frisch once observed \u27The truth is the best camouflage - nobody believes it\u27. Recently at a suburban Scrabble club meeting the truth of that observation was brought home to me. I opened my game against a neophytic player with AI. \u27Hang on a tick\u27 he exclaimed. \u27What does that mean?\u27 \u27It\u27s the three-toed Brazilian sloth.\u27 By way of demonstration I jumped up and cavorted about the room yelling \u27Ah-ee, ah-ee, ah-ee\u27, beating my chest and scratching my armpits like an ai might do. My opponent folded his arms in disbelief. \u27Yeah right. As if. I happen to know that \u27ai\u27 is the first person singular form of the French verb avoir \u27to have\u27. That makes it a foreign word. Challenge!\u2

Contrary Cognomina

Many of our surnames have origins in the nomenclature of trades and professions. Once upon a time Smiths were smiths, Butchers were butchers and Carpenters were carpenters. Holgate, for example, derives from the common noun tollgate. Back in the eleventh century my ancestors were rewarded for collecting tolls and swelling the royal coffers with a Norman castle in Shropshire. Nowadays a profession-based patronym does not oblige its owner to continue in the cognominal business. Just as well - I have no desire to work as a toll collector on the motorway or an assessor in the Tax Office