Archive for 1: lowercase 1
Stacey Kraemer points out that John Gorka's song "Out of My Mind" starts out: You're out of my mind. Guess that makes two of us... Pierre Abbat provides a line from Art. Moger's The Complete Pun Book (p. 160): After vigorously massaging the patient's back, the chiropractor said, "By golly, it's going to rain." The […]
It was sometime in the spring of 1990. We were sitting in a van, riding back to our dorm, when Karen suddenly said, "Have you ever twiddled somebody else's thumbs?" We tried it; it worked about as well as twiddling one's own thumbs. Someone said "He twiddled her thumbs," which besides not being the usual […]
"Wight" provides another political double dactyl: Higgledy Piggledy Adalai Stevenson lost it to Dwight and be- came quite bereft. He had his platform and uncompromisingly put himself just too damn far to the left. This has a couple of minor scansion problems, like the extra syllable in "Adlai," but I thought it made a nice […]
Recall from column d that a double dactyl is a poem of roughly this form: Higgledy Piggledy First name and last name here, Then something clever on What he/she did. Stanza two uses a Hexasyllabicword; Finish it up with a Topper or lid. —JEH The word "dactyl" derives from the Greek word meaning "finger" (as […]
Angie Thieriot writes to ask for information on the intriguing-sounding topic of "Persian Enigmatists." If anyone has pointers to such information, send them to me and I'll pass them along. Also, I note that column r is by far the most-accessed column I've written; it's received about four times as many hits as any other […]
"What goes up a chimney down, but can't go down a chimney up?" Nearly everyone knows a few modern-style riddles—questions with humorous answers to be guessed by listeners, often involving a pun but sometimes consisting of sheer nonsensical silliness. Modern riddles are often collected in volumes with humorous illustrations, and evocative titles like 1001 Riddles. […]
Dobe suggests "are <— share," which brings up an extension or variation of the Queen's Game: beheading by two letters to produce a non-rhyming word. I'm not certain yet whether such two-letter beheadments are significantly more common than the one-letter version; so far I've only found a few: at <— beat/heat cord <— record eat […]
Every book about wordplay is required (by a little-known law) to contain at least one section pertaining to words which turn into other words when you remove letters. The goal can be to find curtailable words (which you can remove the last letter from and still have a valid word), beheadable words (removing the first […]
Similarity—the idea that two non-identical things are nonetheless related in some way—is a powerful concept. The idea seems natural to us because humans are pretty good at discovering similarities, drawing analogies, and creating metaphors. When we're told that two things are similar, we can usually draw some connection between them. Given an analogy or metaphor, […]
Em Jay Dee sent me a note on "Short words": As I came home, I tried to say things with just short words. But soon I saw that the short words came out of me with no need for help; the sound was quite good, since I first learned to talk with just short words, […]