Forced Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is a familiar phenomenon in language. It refers to words that sound somewhat like their meanings -- e.g., bang, splash, hiss, boom, plop, etc. It is widely recognized that onomatopoetic words are based on fairly subjective, culturally determined ideas about the verbal equivalents of noises found in nature. In the February 1975 issue of Word Ways, Maxey Brooke pointed out that French dogs are understood to be sounding out a ouat-ouat sound, German dogs haf-haf, Chines dogs wah-wah, and so on

James Moffett’s Lit Crit and Holy Writ

In one of Moffett\u27s final presentations, he traced parallels between literary criticism and the study of scripture from various traditions. He explained the development of his Points of View spectrum as a response to his high school teaching experiences and presented an updated version of the spectrum

Anagramania

Some lovers of language are merely smitten, others are outright crazy. I\u27m in the former category, so I devised an even dozen anagrams for the word anagram and let it go at that

Quancrete Poetry

In t he February 1993 Word Ways, David Morice wrote about crossnumber forms, a rule-governed arrangement of grids composed of numbers that are spelled out. the goal in crossnumber forms is to discover nontrivial patterns of horizontal and vertical interconnectedness, as in two of Morice\u27s simple but elegant examples

Reviews

Reviews Julie J. Nichols - Meaning and The Evolution of Consciousness: A Retrospective on the Writing of Owen Barfield Charles Suhor - The Great Transfonnation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions Charles Suhor - The Chalice and the Blade Edward Sullivan - The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performanc