\u27Cause the Bible Told Me So

To The Editor: For years I have been entertained by letters calling attention to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, masturbation, wine drinking, and kindred topics. Are these letter writers aware, I wonder, that the Old Testament condones smoking

Magic with Bizarre Poems

A strange collection of poems entitled Shadows in the Moonlight, was written and privately printed in Los Angeles in 1927 by T. page Wright, a Hollywood script writer. Wright was a skillful amateur magician who wrote the poems so that the book could be used for performing a feat of mental magic. Each of the 22 poems is so constructed that the nineteenth word is rose and the thirty-first word is love. The book originally sold in magic stores for five dollars, but is now extremely scarce

A Poem

Martin Gardner\u27s poem Good Sport

Word Ways Magic

This trick is based on a paper-fold idea by Max Maven that I included in my Sterling book Mental Magic. It occurred to me that Word Ways applied nicely to the trick

A Poem: Magic Word

A poem

Kickshaws

A collection of linguistic kickshaws assembled by a guest editor

Word Play in the L. Frank Baum Fantasies

Lyman Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and thirteen other Oz books, also wrote many fantasies for children that did not have Oz as a setting. In all these books he liked to make up names for persons, places, and things. These names often involved word play. Puns were the most common form, but Baum also indulged in anagrams, spoonerisms, reversals, and other forms of linguistic whimsies

Kickshaws

Gardner wrote two kickshaws for Word Ways -- one in February 1981 and one in November 1983. They are reprinted here

A Poem

This is an excerpt from Gardner\u27s 1969 book Never Make Fun Of A Turtle, My Son (Simon and Schuster, illustrated by John Alcorn)