Arthur supplies this switchback ladder: MIRED DENIM LINED DEVIL LIVER REVEL LEVEL LEVER BEVEL There are several other places you can go from LEVER, such as REBEL or RAVEL, but none of them seem to lead anywhere useful. I thought it would be really cool to mirror the ladder through the palindrome—that is, to go […]
There are plenty of words which turn into other words when spelled backward. (No, not when spelled "backward," smart-aleck. When the order of the letters is reversed, okay?) "Straw" turns into "warts," "mart" into "tram," "room" into "moor," "reward" into "drawer." More unusual—or at least less commonly discussed—are words I call "switchbacks": words which turn […]
Thida Cornes, Sarah Liberman, and I went tripping, and we took acid, beanies, coke, downers, ecstasy (and ethanol), flying ointment, ganja (and glue), Haldol (and horse, and heroin), incense, junk, lithium (and LSD), marijuana, nicotine, opium, PCP, quaaludes, rum, sinsemilla (and smack), tea, uppers, Vivarin (and Valium), willow bark, X, and yerba buena. zowie! (I'm […]
When airplane pilots and military personnel need to refer to letters of the alphabet, they use the NATO phonetic alphabet. In this system there's a word for each letter, to avoid confusion among letters whose names sound similar (especially over a noisy radio): Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima […]