{"id":18576,"date":"2023-05-20T10:36:56","date_gmt":"2023-05-20T17:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18576"},"modified":"2023-05-19T11:09:58","modified_gmt":"2023-05-19T18:09:58","slug":"anagrams-of-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2023\/05\/20\/anagrams-of-sin\/","title":{"rendered":"Anagrams of sin"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019ve been reading some of Dylan Thomas\u2019s early short stories. I noticed fairly quickly that one of the recurring place names in them, \u201cLlareggub,\u201d is \u201cbugger all\u201d backwards; but it didn\u2019t occur to me to look carefully at other names in them.<\/p>\r\n<p>But then I poked around online to find out more about the stories, and found a paper that quoted Thomas as referring to a \u201cchorus of deadly sins, anagrammatized as old gentlemen,\u201d and the paper connected that phrase to Thomas\u2019s story \u201cThe Holy Six.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>So I went back and looked at that story. The six men referred to in the title have these names:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Mr. Stul<\/li>\r\n  <li>Mr. Edger<\/li>\r\n  <li>Mr. Vyne<\/li>\r\n  <li>Mr. Rafe<\/li>\r\n  <li>Mr. Lucytre<\/li>\r\n  <li>Mr. Stipe<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>The introduction of those characters in the first paragraph of the story describes the reaction that each of them has to seeing women in the town that they\u2019re passing through; if you\u2019re paying attention (as I was not), those descriptions are strong hints about what each of the men represents.<\/p>\r\n<p>After I understood that they were anagrams, I could decipher most of them easily:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>lust<\/li>\r\n  <li>greed<\/li>\r\n  <li>envy<\/li>\r\n  <li>fear<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>\u2026But I had more trouble with the last two. <i>Stipe<\/i>, I thought: <i>pesti<\/i>, as in <i>pestilence<\/i>? <i>tipse<\/i>, as in <i>tipsy<\/i>? <i>piest<\/i>, sort of like <i>priest<\/i>? <i>piste<\/i>?<\/p>\r\n<p>I looked at a list of the Seven Deadly Sins:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>pride<\/li>\r\n  <li>greed<\/li>\r\n  <li>wrath<\/li>\r\n  <li>envy<\/li>\r\n  <li>lust<\/li>\r\n  <li>gluttony<\/li>\r\n  <li>sloth<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>\u2026but Thomas\u2019s use of <i>fear<\/i> made clear that this was not an exact correspondence, so that list wasn\u2019t especially helpful.<\/p>\r\n<p>I ended up resorting to an online anagram generator, which told me the answer for <i>Stipe<\/i>: it is, of course, <i>spite<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<p>But that still left me with <i>Lucytre<\/i>. I tried the anagram generator on that\u2014but all the anagrams it could find were <i>cut rely<\/i> and <i>utc rely<\/i>. I started to think that maybe Thomas had made a partial or misspelled anagram.<\/p>\r\n<p>But then I noticed that <i>Lucytre<\/i> anagrams to <i>cutlery<\/i>, which is not a major sin as far as I know, but which is a valid and fairly common English word. Which revealed to me that the anagram generator I was using was not a good one.<\/p>\r\n<p>So I went where I should have gone in the first place: the good old <a href=\"https:\/\/new.wordsmith.org\/anagram\/\">I, Rearrangement Servant<\/a>, a.k.a. Internet Anagram Server, my go-to source for quality machine-generated anagrams for decades.<\/p>\r\n<p>And it found not only <i>cutlery<\/i> but also the word that Thomas intended: <i>cruelty<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>On a side note: further reading made clear that the first anagram generator that I had looked at is a <em>human-created<\/em> anagram generator; it apparently only lists anagrams that its human users have explicitly entered. That kind of approach works well for crowdsourced systems like Wikipedia, but it seems to me to be a terrible approach to an anagram generator, where a computer can generate all possible anagrams of a given string of letters much faster and more reliably than a human can.<\/p>\r\n<p>I can imagine a human-<em>curated<\/em> system, where the computer generates all the possibilities and humans indicate which ones are the best or most common or most likely or funniest or whatever. I can even imagine letting humans add annotations, to include things like near-anagrams and explanations of puns. But showing only those anagrams that a human has specified just doesn\u2019t seem like a good idea to me.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anagrams"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18576"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18581,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18576\/revisions\/18581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}