That\u27s in a Name

Traditionally a favorite linguistic recreation, anagramming becomes especially diverting when applied to personal names. The typical result is a phrase which in some respect describes the person associated with the name. In Howard Bergerson\u27s familiar work Palindromes and Anagrams, there are eight anagrams on the name William Ewart Gladstone, each giving someone\u27s perception of that man

Four From Four Isn\u27t Zero

The title applies to the following tetrad of poems, written entirely in four-letter words. In these pages in November 1986, I reported on the results of a prior experiment which I had conducted to test the literal sense of a Cole Porter lyric which claimed that contemporary authors now only use four-letter words in their writings. Prose presented definite difficulties, but verse appeared to be moderately tractable

Logo Rythms

An invoice here? Aye, due. Was that a tear? Eye dew. Who needs a beer? I do

Pick Your -lily Adverbs With Care

When John Henry Newman wrote Lead, Kindly Light at sea on June 16 1933, he didn\u27t mispunctuate, intending Lead Kindly, Light . How can one say this with confidence 180 years later? Very simply, because we know that Newman would never had been guilty of such a syntactical faux pas. Instead, he would have had to write Lead Kindlily, Light , sacrificing sound to sense

An Elaborate Medieval Mnemonic

Every schoolboy is familiar with such memory aids as ROY G BIV for the colors of the rainbow or FACE for the interlineal notes of the treble clef. Far fewer people are aware of an elaborate but tightly-constructed mnemonic used in an earlier era to remember the various forms of the syllogism. To review, a syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion

Reaganagram Reprise

As the curtain rises on the denouement of the Reagan years, it seems appropriate to renew the search for apposite transposals of the President\u27s name. In the May 1984 issue of Word Ways, the term Reaganagram was introduced by Mike Morton and A. Ross Eckler in reference to interesting permutations of the eighteen letter in RONALD WILSON REAGAN, or alphabetically arranged, AAADEGILLNNNOORRSW. To the hundreds of examples of computer-generated scramblings contained in their article, the human touch was added in the August 1984 issue through various contributions from readers

Digital Verse

The English poets have taken an amiguous posture with regard to digital verse. On the one hand, they appear to delight in referring to the product of their craft as numbers . Examples abound. In A Psalm of Life Longfellow wrote, Tell me not, in mournful numbers,Life is but an empty dream

Four Byte Word Text News

Had he been a novelist, rather than a lyricist, Cole Porter might never have made the musical claim that contemporary novelists use only four-letter words in their writings. Whether the assertion is viewed as prevarication or exaggeration, one thing is clear. No known novel, present or past, has the characteristic proclaimed in Anything Goes