Scrabble® training level zero

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wordplay

I knew there were more 2-letter words than most folks think of, but I didn't know there are 101. According to Stephin Merritt's introduction to 101 Two-Letter Words, the official list of "acceptable" words you can use playing Scrabble® is 101.

Anyway, Merritt is a songwriter, and a fast hand with a rhyme, so when he found himself writing cute quatrains for various 2-letter words, he decided to do them all. With the help of Roz Chast, whose cartoons you might have seen in New Yorker and elsewhere, 202 pages were occupied with the rhymes such as this one for HO:

"Ho, ho, ho," says old Saint Nick,
But saint for what, exactly?
Mayhap for hopping round the world
and getting back intactly.

And here is Santa upon his return. I reckon you can see why I call the work of Ms Chast "charmingly ugly".

And I applaud them both for picking this meaning for HO in preference for another of more recent vintage.

It is interesting, of 676 possible 2-letter combinations, nearly 15% are considered words. I reckon that is the highest percentage going. But even a lower percentage for 3-letter words would still pile up to a lot, as there are 17,576 to start with, and nearly 1,300 (7.4%) that the Scrabble® folks count. That would make for a much bigger book.

This fellow REALLY knows how to chase a rabbit

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, words, wordplay, etymology

Herewith, my own definition:

To chase a rabbit - to follow a series of associations, particularly as they lead in unexpected directions. Particularly applies to rambling discussions.

The above is a pretty good metaphor for a bull session. Bull, of course, being short for bullshit, and both parts of that word have their roots and uses, both together and separate, and so forth. However, The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth (AKA The Inky Fool) is a far deeper chase through brambles and weeds than I am competent to pursue. As the subtitle says, the work is circular, beginning and ending with the question of whether one can turn up a book (you can't).

Looking back, I find that the author could have closed the loop in a number of places. He is one who prefers to keep the rabbit running as long as possible, or at least until a specified word count is achieved. The 113 chapters cover 259 pages, plus another 19 of quizzes and other arcana. I think it most useful to pick 3 spots at random (and an easy cop out):

• p 27 – The phrase we find is letting the cat out of the bag, which actually has to do with someone trying to sell a pig in a poke (sack). You avoid being scammed by peeking inside, and seeing there is no pig, you let the cat out. But this was a side path in a discussion of archery, and the term point blank. No one should be surprised to know that blank in this case derives from blanc, or white in French. White is the color of the bullseye. If you are standing close enough to the target, you can hit the center without aiming high to account for gravity: you point right at it because you are at point blank range. The term bullseye is not followed, but could lead along an interesting path.
• p 58 – This begins a discussion of three names related to "justice", loosely construed, and their relation in particular to capital punishment. The names are Guillotin, Derrick, and Jack Robinson. We find that Thomas Derrick was a thoroughly bad man whose death sentence was commuted on the condition that he become the executioner for the Earl of Essex. The gallows is also called a derrick in his "honor", and the word is now applied to various kinds of lifting structures. Jack Robinson has several variously plausible sources, but the most likely is that Sir John Robinson, constable of the Tower of London, carried out executions with great efficiency, getting them over with so quickly that it was said you couldn't say "Jack Robinson" between the time you were called out and your head rolled. The final part of executions got even quicker when the mild Dr. Guillotin was placed on a commission to reform executions. Having seen a German head-chopping blade, he told his colleagues that if executions had to be done, that machine would do it best. Now even the Germans call it the guillotine.
• p 247 – The word amateur, which means lover, and why love is zero in tennis. If the gentleman who created lawn tennis had had his way, it would be distinguished from hard-court tennis by being called sphairistike, which rhymes with "very sticky". We've been spared, at least in part because tennis players didn't know enough Greek to figure out the pronunciation. But then, love? Because if you do something for love, you'll do it for nothing. I still don't like it (and the entire love-15-30-40 sequence, which makes no numeric sense, because you have to win on an advantage anyway, after winning at least 3 serves).

Now if you can't imagine how the Inky Fool gets from any of these points to the others, do just read the book. Great fun!

Battling proverbs

kw: wordplay, proverbs, collections

Over time I have gathered a number of pairs of proverbs that have opposite meanings. A quick search of the web scared up a few more. In no particular order, here are 31 such sets. In a few cases, one proverb is contradicted by two or more others.

A silent man is a wise one.
A man without words is a man without thoughts.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Don't beat your head against a stone wall.

Don't cross that bridge until you come to it.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. / Forewarned is forearmed. / If you fail to plan, plan to fail.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Out of sight, out of mind.

Two heads are better than one.
Paddle your own canoe.

Time waits for no man.
Haste makes waste.

He who hesitates is lost.
Look before you leap. / Act in haste, repent at leisure.

You're never too old to learn.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

It is better to be safe than sorry.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Nice guys finish last.

Hitch your wagon to a star.
Don't bite off more that you can chew.

The best things in life are free.
You get what you pay for. / There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Many hands make light work.

Clothes make the man.
Don't judge a book by its cover. / Appearances are deceiving.

Do it well, or not at all.
Half a loaf is better than none.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Silence is golden.

Familiarity breeds contempt.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

Great minds think alike.
Idiots seldom differ.

Birds of a feather flock together.
Opposites attract.

Winners never quit.
Quit while you're ahead.

Look before you leap.
You don't know what you can do until you try.

The bigger, the better.
Good things come in small packages.

The more, the merrier.
Two's company; three's a crowd.

Above all, to thine own self be true.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
One man's meat is another man's poison.

Actions speak louder than words.
The pen is mightier than the sword.

Never change horses in the middle of a stream.
Variety is the spice of life.

Practice makes perfect.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

A penny saved is a penny earned.
The love of money is the root of all evil.

Hold fast to the words of your ancestors.
Wise men make proverbs and fools repeat them.

The largest homophone set

kw: words, wordplay, homophones

Air, are (a land measure), ere, e'er, err, Eyre, and heir are seven words that are pronounced the same in most regional dialects of English. I collect groups of homophones (also frequently called homonyms), and of the roughly 800 sets I have gathered, this is the largest. Nearly all the sets have two members, and only a handful have four or more. Of these seven, the two spellings that most clearly express the pronunciation for most people are air, rhyming with hair, and heir, in which the h is silent.

These words are not equally familiar, so let's define each:

• air is the stuff we breathe. The word can also refer to a popular tune, though this usage is falling out of use: "She sat at the piano and played a simple air."
  
• are as a measure of land is to be distinguished from the verb of the same spelling, but pronounced to sound just like the letter r. An are is 100 square meters, and the more familiar measure hectare is 100 ares, roughly equal to 2.5 acres.
  
• ere is a poetic preposition meaning "before". It is found at the center of the palindrome that expresses a possible thought by Napoleon in exile: "Able was I ere I saw Elba."
  
• e'er Is another poetic expression, a contraction for ever. You'll find it in some older songs, and in many hymns, which frequently rhyme fore'er with there or where.
  
• err is a verb meaning to make a mistake: "To err is human; to forgive, divine."
  
• Eyre is the surname of the heroine of the novel Jane Eyre. The name is sometimes pronounced with a more distinct y sound, but this is rather rare, and tends to make it a two-syllable word.
  
• heir is someone who will inherit. While most people assume an heir is a person's child, your actual heir is whomever you designate in your will. You do have a will, don't you? Without one, upon your untimely death, the government of the state or nation in which you live will decide who your heirs are.

Most European languages are like English in being rather poor in homophones. By contrast, Chinese has so many that, if the language were written with an alphabet rather than ideographic characters, it would be almost impossible to decipher. Even Japanese, which started out as a wholly unique language, has adopted so many Chinese pronunciations of common words that some homophone groups in Japanese have thirty or more members. Of course, this means that these Asian languages are much richer in possibilities for punning!

Some funny ditties

kw: wordplay, verse

I saw this when I was a grade schooler. To figure it out, you have to try to read it aloud, rather quickly:

Seville dar dago
Tousin busis inaro
Nojo demstrux
Sumit cosun sumit dux

Ponder this a while, if you haven't seen it. Translation provided below. Meanwhile, here is one I saw in college. With the exception of one rebus, it is also phonetic. I have to use an image of the whole thing, because there isn't a way to conveniently insert rebuses into text in this scripting tool.


This one may be easier to figure out than the other, at first. Once you get either one, you'll suddenly see the other. So, in case both stump you. . .



First:

See, Willy! There they go,
Thousand buses in a row.
No, Joe. Them's trucks.
Some wit' cows and some wit' ducks.



Second:

'Em are spiders, 'em are.
'Em are no spiders! Oh, yes, 'ey are!
See the eyes? See the beady, beady eyes?
'Em are spiders, 'em are!

Ever see a single smithereen?

kw: words, wordplay

I suppose we have all heard the term "blasted to smithereens." Some years ago, I began to wonder, was there ever the singular word "smithereen"? As it happens, yes, indeed. The word is of Irish origin, and began as a name. Somehow, it morphed into a synonym for "smidgen" and similar words meaning a tiny bit. Once the phrase "blown to smithereens" arose in the 1880s, this usage came to dominate, so by 1940 or so, the singular form nearly dropped out of use.

Other words seen only, or almost only, as plural forms include

• Clothes, as in "Put on your clothes." "Clothe" is a verb, and "a clothe" as a noun is practically unknown.
• Scissors, usually "pair of scissors", though sometimes I've heard "get me a scissors". In one of his lesser known songs, Allen Sherman ("Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah") asked if "half a pair of scissors is a single sizz?". I am guessing at the spelling!
• Glasses and spectacles, as referring to eyewear, are always plural, but both words occur in singular form with other meanings.

Certain words occur in phrases beginning "pair of": earrings, pants, trousers, jeans, shoes, slippers, gloves. Most of these are less commonly used in singular form, such as "I dropped an earring", although I have never seen or heard "a jean".

Then there are collective, plural nouns such as people and police. There are instances in which "these peoples" is a valid usage, but I know of no way that "polices" can appear except as a verb.

Language is a funny beast. A language grows organically. Attempts to construct language produce, at best, niches of usage. Esperanto is the best example, and it is experiencing change as its limitations cause distress. The existence of such "always plural" (or nearly so) words indicates that there is a need for such constructs, and nowhere is it more evident than in language, that necessity is the mother of invention.

A juicy trip through the alphabet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wordplay, words, collections

Roy Blount, Jr. collects words, particularly their origins and associations. Three years ago he published Alphabet Juice, which has a very long subtitle. The title of the current volume is better-behaved: Alphabetter Juice: or, the Joy of Text. And a joy it is. As before, there is no need to read in any particular order. Indeed, throughout, a word or phrase in bold face indicates you ought to go look it up elsewhere in the book. It is a sort of hyperlink.

Each letter's section begins with a discursion—and often a digression—on the letter itself, its sound, other sounds it can contribute to, and so forth. C, for example, starts with the Sesame Street image of a cookie with a big bite taken out, passes via cookie-cutter sharks to "Cookie" as something you might call an attractive woman, then gets into the sound: kooky and cuckoo, but not why one has a "k"; then to cootch and to the similar-sounding, but much different "Coochy-coo". All that just to set the stage for thirteen short items (articles, essays, something else?), including a couple of pages of doggerel about eating crabs and lobsters (under crustaceous).

One of the longer items is gillie, girl and travels through quite a gaggle of related words and word origins. Somehow, he spends quite a bit of it upon fishing for salmon in Iceland, or rather, mostly watching a self-important master fisherman laboring to land a leg-length salmon on rather inadequate tackle.

Throughout, the author will frequently comment on whether a word is sonicky, a word he coined that he intends to carry more meaning than onomatopoeic. For example, knickknack (a great trap for playing SuperGhosts: follow an opening "k" with "k" and see if your opponent knows where to go with it) is echoic, made up of two instances of knack, an old word for snapping the fingers. This is suitably sonicky all by itself, but the author ends by stating, "Knickknacks tend to be clicky little things on the shelf." It just wouldn't be the same if your tchotchkes were called "smoofs". The word really needs all its k's.

And that knickknack-tchotchke synonymy is a large part of what the author is also about. In many languages, a word and its synonyms often carry similar sounds, and not just because "it all started with proto-Indo-European" (PIE). In Japanese, which is definitely not from PIE, the word for cat is neko. The "K" sound is the key here, as befits a small, skittery animal. Though we tend to think of our house cats as warm, soft bricks for keeping our laps occupied, they originated as high-strung mousers with a tendency to run right up a wall, particularly if there were drapes handy to ease the process. (Cat is not covered in this volume, and I don't recall if it appeared in the earlier one. This is just my fancy bouncing off his ways.)

In a closing word, the author hints at a third book that may be on the way, to be titled Alphabest Juice, but what manner of subtitle may be appended, we'll have to wait and see.

Fun with words and history

kw: words, wordplay, history, graphics

Google has a useful and fun tool in its Ngram viewer! At the URL shown, a page opens up with a couple of sample words already loaded, and the default time limits set from years 1800 to 2000. For this first graph, I reset the first date to 1600 and put in a couple of words I know are historical and nearly out of use: thee and thou:

You'll need to click on these images to see all the detail. They are reduced to about 45% here. Those who are familiar with thee and thou know they are the archaic singular pronouns for "you". In this graph, we see primarily the references in literature that use Shakespearean language (the language of the King James Bible), up to the early or middle 1700s, and later on primarily those found in literature that quote the KJB or early versions of Shakespeare. Many modern printings of Shakespeare's works have replaced thee and thou with you, and removed numerous other archaisms.

While there is lots a person can do with the Ngram tool, I'll just introduce the possibilities with another example. First, I changed the collection from "English" to "English Fiction", set the smoothing factor from 3 to 1, and then put in the name of three major cities in which I've spent some time (eleven years, in the case of L.A.):

This is interesting. San Francisco is the most-mentioned city of the three prior to 1910, then New York City is neck-and-neck with it for thirty years; this is followed by NYC dropping out as L.A. rises, to run equal with S.F. after 1970. "So," I thought, "let's add the best-known Midwestern city, Chicago.":

What a difference! Since about 1870, Chicago has been by far the most-mentioned of these four, in English-language literature. To keep this short, I'll refrain from adding graphs for overseas cities, but as a hint for the US-centric: London is mentioned at least twice as often as Chicago, every year, and at that same level, steady, going back 250 years or more.

In a part of the web page that I didn't show, you are offered the chance to download portions of their word index to do your own larger-scale experiments. There's your chance to try this experiment with dozens of cities, or word groups of your choice.

Put up with it

kw: wordplay

No links today . . .

There is a cute piece of whimsy that gets e-mailed to me every few weeks, with 48 uses of the word UP. One online dictionary lists about thirty definitions for UP. I wonder when someone will get really creative with PUT. The same dictionary has nearly seventy definitions for PUT, but I read somewhere that the Oxford English Dictionary has about 300.

That is probably more than any one is willing to put into a comprehensive e-mail. Not that I'm put out about it, mind you . . .

Blame it on ForTran

kw: observations, musings, wordplay

People have been goofing around with alternative and aberrant spelling and capitalization of words in English (and in many other languages) for generations, but there seems to be a current rash of capitalization creativity over the past three or four decades. When I first learned FORTRAN II, its name was always written in all caps. Then about the time FORTRAN IV came out (1966), a kind of tipping point occurred, with newer models of many line printers being able to print both upper and lower case, and ForTran was briefly popular. That makes sense, as the name means Formula Translation. But pretty soon, Fortran was adopted as a secondary standard, and FORTRAN has remained the preferred name.

Jump forward a decade or so, with the spread of languages such as Pascal and C. Two programming styles arose, and still vie for dominance. In one, all text is in lower case, except quoted strings that are in sentence form. Constructs such as variable names are produced by using the underscore character (specific_gravity or cost_analysis). In the other, programmers are encouraged to write names that are capitalized, with constructs leaving out the underscore, and having each word capitalized (SpecificGravity or CostAnalysis). This latter convention, as much as any other influence, has led to millions of people thinking up alternative capitalizations.

So when a presentation package needed a name, somebody at Microsoft came up with PowerPoint. Now it has been joined by LeaseRite, JavaRanch, StateMaster, WikiNotes, FrontPage, etc. In transition to other forms, there are partial abbreviations such as RegEx (for regular expression, AKA regex); then a flurry of things like GEForce (or GeForce), GForge and OpenID.

An interesting side branch is the word with a single capital letter, but it is not the first: eBay or iPhone. Another is the fully mixed-case word: TaB, TeX, or LaTeX. This culminated in a logo I saw in an ad today: SKrAPr. While it is yet another of those "wait, there's more!" over-marketed gimcracks, it does have the most creative name to come along lately. I propose calling all of these, from ForTran to PowerPoint to TaB to SKrAPr by the new term MultiCaps. They have become a special class of proper noun.

I note that Blogger's spelling checker is complaining about nearly all of these, except for a few older ones. Spell checkers are always going to be a step behind. Then again, so are us fogies!

You can BFF but not LOL in hex

kw: observations, musings, wordplay

I happened to notice recently that the abbreviation BFF (best friends forever) showed up as part of one of those long URL's that contain strings of hex-codes. In case anyone is interested, the hexadecimal string BFF converts to decimal 3071.

I ran an exclusion search of my spelling dictionary and found 66 words formed only of the letters A through F:

A
AB
ABACA
ABBE
ABE
ABED
ACCEDE
ACCEDED
ACE
ACED
AD
ADA
ADD
ADDED
ADE
BAA
BAAED
BABE
BAD
BADE
BE
BEA
BEAD
BEADED
BED
BEDDED
BEE
BEEBE
BEEF
BEEFED
CAB
CAD
CAFE
CECA
CEDE
CEDED
DAB
DABBED
DACE
DAD
DADA
DEAD
DEAF
DECADE
DECCA
DEED
DEEDED
DEFACE
DEFACED
E
EBB
EBBED
ED
EFFACE
EFFACED
FA
FACADE
FACADED
FACE
FACED
FAD
FADE
FADED
FED
FEE
FEED

Just a few of these require explanation: E is found in the Latin motto "E Pluribus Unum" on the dollar bill, and means "from"; ABACA and ABBE are names; and FA is the tone-name of the fourth musical note in the diatonic scale (Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do). The others all ought to be well known, though the adjective FACADED is getting obsolete.