Wordplay in the Wild redux

Thanks to old high school friend Kentaro (which, come to think of it, also means 'thanks to Facebook'), I now have this example of what may be the loveliest ambigram you're ever likely to see outside of puzzle books and Dan Brown novels. Nicely done!

LATER: I just noticed, though. The cover is a spoiler! Look away, children! Look away!

Words Younger Than John McCain

Okay. I'm starting my real writing any second now (note to self: Take the wi-fi card OUT at night!) But I got a bug in my ear about the site Things Younger Than McCain--not that his age is an issue, per se (I don't think it is), but that it might serve as an interesting way to look at our language, and a good excuse for me to use the ultra-cool "date search" function of the Merriam-Webster 11th Collegiate Dictionary CD-ROM.

So here, for your enjoyment, is a partial list of words that entered written English after 1936 (McCain's birth year) and before 1940. These concepts all had to be invented after he was born. (And, to be fair, after my dad was, too. My dad would make a fine President.)

WORDS YOUNGER THAN JOHN MCCAIN

acorn squash

addictive

attendee

balding (adj.)

bicep

black belt

Bloody Mary

border collie

Brooklynese

brownnose

bubble gum

burger

busload

carport

cocktail lounge

crack down

crew neck

de-emphasize

dirndl

doodle (noun)

finger painting

freelancer

fucked-up

glove compartment

gurney

high beam

hook check

horror story

hundreds place

itty-bitty

jalapeno

jukebox

life vest

matchbook

moola

mountain gorilla

newscast

pen pal

percussionist

pesto

pillow talk

pinking shears

pizzazz

pollster

private eye

rat race

running time

Russian roulette

salad bar

screw around

second-degree burn

senior citizen

ski lift

smallmouth bass

squad car

switch-hit

teal blue

tourist trap

two cents (as in “put my two cents in”)

unzip

vichyssoise

windchill

women’s room

UPDATE: Hey, I just got linked to the Official Site! I feel so honored! Go visit today!

LATER UPDATE: I just found out that apparently many of Merriam-Webster's dates are flawed. Damn. For now, though, and until they have a coolly searchable OED, I'm standing by my collegiate, quomodocumquizing be damned.

Soccergirl and Ryan P., or Why College Towns are Great

(Above: some guy I don't know, Soccergirl, and Ryan P., at a podcasting/new media con in 2006.)

I've been doing a surprising amount of my writing at The Black Swan in Tivoli. I'm not sure why it works, but I've been able to write up to 1,000 words an hour in the deafening clamor there after spending an unproductive day all by myself in the peaceful and distractionless environment of a country cabin. But sometimes I get to Tivoli a little early, so the other day I found myself at a restaurant called Santa Fe, and I started chatting up the bartender/server.

I mentioned that I was a writer, and she said, "I'm a writer too." Turns out she's famous! Not as a writer (yet) but as a podcaster. She's "Soccergirl" of Soccergirl Incorporated and--does it get sexier than this?--she's a pioneering figure; one of the first women to actually make a living by podcasting a solo show. (Sure enough, if you download some of her podcasts, you see actual advertisements for BBC America. Hott!) We just wound up talking and talking, and--long story short--I had dinner a few nights ago with her and Ryan P., her partner of six years. And it turns out Ryan is ALSO funny and brilliant and great company.

Just when I'd written off this part of the country as tedious and backwoodsy, and was just marking my time until my escape, along comes this pair of great people, and all of a sudden I have someone to celebrate reaching 100,000 words with. I expressed wonder at this, and Soccergirl pointed out, "Well we are right near Bard College. So actually, there are lots of smart fun people here." I keep underestimating the Hinterlands. College towns are great.

Oh, and you know what else? Because it's a college town, The Black Swan is open until FOUR. They don't even do that in Chicago. And it's very useful for folks like me if I've had, say, a slow start and haven't begun writing until 8 or 9. I still get many hours in and, therefore, a happy ending just in time for bed.

Anyway, I just had to share the following fact. Ryan P. told me that his favorite word, which he came across in the OED, is "quomodocumquise" (or, presumably, quomodocumquize in America), which means "to make money any way one can." Unfortunately I haven't been able to confirm this word myself (I'm away from all my references), but if he's represented it properly, I am totally writing a vocabulary poem on it, even though it violates my general "New International Second Edition only" principle.

No, I don't know why they're not National Puzzlers League members. Ryan is even a library sciences grad student, which is practically a prerequisite. I'm working on it.

AFTERNOTE: This reminds me of a story. One day during grad school while I was feeling really stuck and alone in Tallahassee, and in an arrogant mood, I said to a friend of mine, "I just feel like I should be in a big city or something. I mean, what are the odds I'll meet my match in a little town like Tallahassee?" And she said, "Well, you're here..." Touche. I should stop being judgy.


(P.S. I've got a storytelling gig today that'll take a lot of driving, so I can't get much writing done anyway. This has been a planned one-day hiatus, and with any luck I'll post an actual cartoon or poem or something.)

Let Us Now Mock Crappy Puzzles

I've got nothing against Mensa, qua Mensa. Let me just say that up front. Lately I've been working my way quite happily through Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon's Mensa Cryptic Crosswords 2, and enjoying the cleverness and high quality of the puzzles inside. So Mensa has done good things, and I'm not actually sharpening my axe here with malice aforethought.

But while I was looking around my temporary country lodgings the other day, I noticed a puzzle book on the shelf titled Mensa Publications Presents the Ultimate Puzzle Challenge--a book of 400 or so puzzles published in Britain in 1995. Not only is the book ugly--printed on something just one step above butcher paper--but the puzzles are the same ten or so types of puzzles repeated over and over again: Deduce what these symbols weigh; Find what's next in this series; Complete this magic square. They're almost all mathematical, and they're all pretty damned boring. (Admittedly, there is a color section on much nicer paper, with color versions of these same puzzles, but since I'm colorblind there's no point in torturing myself with those.)

And yet, as I was flipping through it, I noticed a few other types of puzzles that were even worse. Take, for example, the Aunt Hildegarde puzzles. As aficionados of Aunt Hildegarde puzzles know, they follow a distinct pattern: Aunt Hildegarde has just visited [Name of Relative], and now she loves X but hates Y... and you have to figured out what's guiding her preferences. If she visited Uncle Wallace, and she loves CHALLAH but hates BREAD, loves OFFENSE but hates DEFENSE, and loves MOUSSAKA but hates FUDGE, you might guess that she likes double letters--as exampled by the double L's in Uncle Wallace's name. It's a potentially fun type of puzzle, and when done well, the variations are always interesting: she visits Uncle Septimus and only likes words that contain chemical symbols; she visits Aunt Mildred and only likes words that contain the names of colors; she visits Cousin Liv and likes finding Roman numberals; and so on.

In the Mensa Ultimate Puzzle Challenge, here are the answers to the three Aunt Hildegarde puzzles: she doesn't like words with S; she likes words containing a U; and--in a puzzle that said, "She likes LILLE but hates PARIS, she likes ANTWERP but hates BERLIN"--it turns out she doesn't like capital cities. Three puzzles, no mental challenge at all worth mentioning. What a depressing waste.

But, having established that the editor (Robert Allen, director of Mensa Publications) is enigmatically tone-deaf, I was appalled further by his occasional tendency to add old-fashioned, full-page riddles. Bad Riddle #1 says in essence,

"Little Johnny wanted to go under the sea. Although his father protested [I've cut out a lot of tedious dialogue], they eventually agreed to do so, even though neither of them swim, there would be real sharks (who somehow wouldn't hurt them), and they were afraid of getting wet ('we won't get wet,' said Johnny). Johnny and his dad are not going diving, or taking a trip in a glass-bottomed boat. So how are they going under the sea without coming to any harm?"

The answer, it should pain you to hear, is, "Johnny wants to go through the glass tunnel at an aquarium." Which ought to, but does not, include the subclause, "...which, in the interest of keeping the puzzle consistent, was actually placed under a real sea, not a series of tanks made to simulate it for tourists." But even after that addition, I feel like adding further, "Or they hopped in a submarine; that would work too."

Bad Riddle #2: "A man came home to find himself locked out of his house and his backyard full of water. An upstairs window was open [which would allow him to get in and unlock the door], but he had no ladder to help him reach it...Then he had an idea. What was it? It did not involve ladders, steps, or climbing up the walls of the house."

I'll give you one sentence of spoiler space, so stop here if you want to think about it before proceeding.

Answer: "The water in his garden was snow. He rolled several giant snowballs, built a pyramid, and climbed up."

I came up with a better answer. "The snow was actually frozen ethane, and he was able to use it for fuel to propel himself skyward. Did I mention he was wearing a jetpack?" This is a guy who will go to any lengths to avoid simply smashing a downstairs window.

Bad Riddle #3: "I have five hands, but you would pass me in the street without comment. Why?"

Official Answer: "Because three of them are on my wrist watch."

My answer: Because they're hidden in my backpack, where I keep all my victims' trophies.

But once you get to the end of the book, in the Brain-Buster section, you get two of the crappiest puzzles of all. Here's the final, brain-busting, be-all-and-end-all riddle:

Bad Riddle #4: "Joshua Shrimp had been at sea for forty years and in that time he had been around the globe many times. However, he had always spent his nights in bed and on dry land. How?"

The answer is so depressingly bad that I've relegated it to the Comments section so you can click it for yourself.

That would be bad enough. But here's one of the final word puzzles. It consisted of a picture of three crates, each one covered with letters. Three crates, mind you. Now here's the text.

Bad Word Puzzle:

"ARROT RCUP RPDRC
LEHAEC TMHEED UPSE
US LE ME

These letters, when joined together correctly, make up a novel and its author. Can you spot it?"

It's really that bad. "Lets just take a title and its author, scramble all the letters, and ask people to reconstruct whatever the hell we were thinking about." But to compound the insult, the visuals of the crates are completely irrelevant to the puzzle! It's not a clue, it's not a "take one letter at a time out of each crate in order" type of thing; he just literally threw down a bunch of random letters and said, "You know, I've got some clip art of a crate that would work here; three of them would give me enough space for all these letters. Good luck, solvers!" This is, hands down, the laziest goddamned excuse for an alleged "puzzle" I've ever seen, lazily tossed off by someone who doesn't seem aware that puzzles are supposed to be fun.

The answer to that one is also in Comments. In the meantime, I have a puzzle for Robert Allen:

The following letters below--divided into three groups for no reason at all--can be rearranged to spell out a three word message. Can you figure out what it's saying?

KFUN UCYS OMEA

A List of Rude-Sounding Upper New York Towns

All of these names can be found on this map, which I opened recently in an attempt to find something fun to do in the nearby area. I failed, but the map was diverting.

Climax
Coxsackie
Valatie (pronounced "vellatia," as I learned from a woman at a bar last night)
East Green Bush
Feura Bush
and possibly, depending on what this makes you picture, Coeyman's Hollow.

By the way, I just noticed that this is my third post in a row that relates to sex in some indirect way. Clearly I either need to get out and develop new non-oblique-sex interests, or go the other direction, have actual sex, and stop blogging altogether for a while. In the meantime, enjoy the products of my geographically forced sublimation.

Wanted: A Consistently Bloodthirsty Dictionary

I'm about to head out for the day's errands, but I just had to mention something. While idly scanning through my NI2 for X words (it's only, like, 3 pages), I noticed the following discrepancy. Here's the eye-popping definition for Xipe:

Xipe (he pa). n. The Aztec god of sowing, and patron of workers in precious metals. Human victims sacrificed to him were flayed.

Now, a page over, we read this:

Xiuhtecutli (he oo ta koo tle). n. The fire god of the Aztecs.

That's it!? One bland sentence? Conspicuously absent from this description is the fact that the slaves who were sacrificed to him were burned alive, and then had their hearts removed before they died. (This article confirms that Xiuhtecutli and Huehueotl were basically the same god, which might explain why NI2 doesn't even list Huehueotl; This article gives the gory details of Huehueotl's worship.)

At first, I thought, "This is the relatively prim NI2 from 1959. Maybe they didn't mention the immolation sacrifice for reasons of taste, and the flaying reference was a fluke." But then I checked up on the definitions for "Tlatloc" and "Tezcatlipoca," and the sacrificial details are given for both of those guys. And the listing for Quetzalcoatl deliberately mentions that he wasn't worshiped with human sacrifice, which seems like an odd thing to mention unless--as happens in the NI2--you're in the habit of mentioning human sacrifice, one way or another, whenever the Aztecs come up. Looks like Xiuhtecutli got screwed.

What I'm saying is, although I love the NI2 deeply and profoundly, I'm forced to admit that someone back in the day fell asleep on the job, and as a result, the New International Unabridged, 2nd Edition, is one sentence less interesting than it should have been. I know it's a big dictionary, but hey, Merriam-Webster: let's see that that doesn't happen again.

The Crosswording World Waits...

Poster for Eliu Rivera. Eliu! I believe that's a brand-new crossword tetragram. Let's hope he goes from Freeholder of the 4th District to some national cabinet position...

Dave Fun Quiz: Food and Drink Wordplay

I've been going to a lot of health food stores recently, and I noticed the following fact: if you take the names of two grains commonly found in health food stores, combine them, and rearrange the letters, you can spell the name of a liqueur common to many mixed drinks. What are the words?

UPDATE: As you might expect, the answers are in the comments. So consider this a spoiler alert.

Vocabulary Poem: Rhipidion

RHIPIDION (rih-PID-ee-un). n. A fan used to keep flies away from the wine in the chalice during the Celebration of the Liturgy. (Eastern Orthodox.)

Before there was MetLife, and back past Providian
Some Byzantine genius devised the rhipidion
As a sort of insurance for Orthodox guys
To keep Jesus' blood unpolluted by flies.

But that wasn't all! Once the fan became known,
Then some other inventors built things of their own:
Like the gagulon rex--a small chisel and mallet
To chip bits of the Host that get stuck to one's palate;

Or the vellux--a cloth stuffed with small bits of cheeses
To capture the wine if some supplicant sneezes;
From the cermyl, a corn-floured, gluten-free Host,
To the etnoi--a cooker for Holy Host toast--

They kept adding--The nouon, the quimmel, the jeltz--
Until Orthodox priests had utility belts!
But through some clumsy mix of tradition and luck,
It seems only the simple rhipidion stuck.

(P.S.--It's just me now, but I wish instead
They'd invented good wine and some tastier bread.)

Out of Town, and Vocabulary Poem Update

I'm heading to the Berkshires for two nights of performances. So I won't have computer access for a while, and therefore I won't be updating for two days or so.

On the plus side, however, I just went over my old blog posts and realized that I have done vocabulary poems on words that start with EVERY letter except R, V, and Y, which have no representation at all. (No R! Isn't that odd?) So I'm taking about two dozen words with me, and when I return I hope to have made up this lack. (I'm particularly optimistic about rhipidion, vaccary, and yaffle, but you never know how inspiration will go, and I'm not saying there won't be a late rally by volvelle or yuzluk.)

(Next up: E, I, K, Q, T, and X, which each have only one poem. Assuming I stay focused on knocking out individual letters rather than simply opening the dictionary at random.)

Introducing Scrabulish!

I recently discovered that if you're on Facebook, and you're playing Scrabulous (their online version of Scrabble which is so far still legal), one of your options is to play a "Challenge" game, which means the computer won't stop you from playing non-dictionary words. So for the past few days I've been playing with my friend Tracy a variation where the game is to NEVER play an actual real word, and to make up plausible-seeming definitions for whatever you play. I call it "Scrabulish." The picture shows the board as it currently stands.

Here's the gameplay so far. I've played the odd moves; Tracy has the even ones:

1. OILET (n. A small oil.)

2. GURNIX (n. A female hospital orderly who physically or psychologically domintates her patients.)

3. Q-ING (n. The inability to draw a clean circle.)

4. BRAIP (v. To burp inwardly.)

5. MIFE (n. Rodents with missing teeth.)

6. TRIADERN (n. one who holds down three jobs.)

7. RANDLESS (adj. Broke, in South Africa.)

8. WOOST (v. To sleep with one eye open.)

9. GRATT/WA/OT/OT (GRATT. v. To drag a rake over a sidewalk; WA. n. A unit of metaphysics, equal to the volume of an average human soul; OT. n. Bird poop, while still in midair.)

10. ROTHKAT (n. a scarf made of thistles, worn diagonally across the breastbone. German.)

11. GREEPIAN (adj. Pertaining to, or in the style of, Edmund Whitcomb Greep (1876-1934), Am. architect and couturier, noted for his mixing of navy and black.)

12. GOGAD (n. a small, perpetually moving article whose common name is unknown or forgotten. See: DOODAD.)

13. COILET/CABIER (COILET. n. A makeshift outhouse constructed from rope; CABIER. n. The guy at the front of a taxi stand who ushers folks in one at a time. French.)

14. VELVO (n. One who dresses entirely in plush fabric.)

15. UNNUI (n. An intense hatred of palindromes.)

Currently I'm leading, 289 to 231. But it's quite literally anyone's game.

Savage On Spitz

One last post today. I was waiting for sex expert Dan Savage to weigh in on the Elliot Spitzer prostitution story. And today he does.

TANGENTIAL AFTERNOTE: I have a lot of friends in the linguistic field. Do any of you people out there know how I would go about looking for an early appearance of a word? Because I'm suddenly curious to find out how long the word "sexpert" has been plaguing us.

My Accidental Googlewhack

One more thing: The other day at lunch I was skimming through an old book called something like "Ask the Word Wizard"--a collection of word-related articles by some person or other who had a column in the nineties and whom I've never heard of--and I noticed that every chapter began with a word-of-the-day entry, and that these words were, in many cases, actually quite interesting, including stigmeology (the art of punctuation), marrowsky (another term for a Spoonerism), and adoxography (skilled writing on a trivial subject--my favorite sort of reading!) Since I write vocabulary poems, I figured I'd write them down. But I also had to check several of them out to see if they're in my own dictionary of record, the New International Second.

Several of them weren't, but one in particular was odd. The word was Quinalpus. Definition: "An authority appealed to to win an argument." (The classic example I immediately thought of was Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, though for many evangelicals the eternal fallback Quinalpus is C.S. Lewis.) I'd heard the word before in some other list of weird words, but it wasn't in NI2. A search of the OED availed me nothing. So then I Googled it--and got exactly one entry.

The link is right here. It consists of a single quote from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, where a clown says, "What says Quinalpus? Better a witty fool than a foolish wit." And you'll note that the general sense of "any unassailable authority" is nowhere present; this is the word's original context (I'm bound) and whatever expansion of the sense that came later is utterly absent.

A Googlewhack, for those who are new, is a sort of game where you attempt to put two unrelated words into a search engine and get back exactly one hit. There are whole sites dedicated to it. But I've never before gotten only a single hit after entering a single word. And what's so very weird is that the usage quoted seems to have come from Shakespeare! So where are all the other online references? Surely there's a website somewhere that lists every character ever even mentioned in Shakespeare's plays, isn't there? Surely there must be a site that actually has the entire script of The Twelfth Night, mustn't there? And if no one actually uses this word in the way "The Word Wizard" does, where the hell did he get the word in the first place?

The only good thing I can think about all this is that this would seem to be proof that maybe, for a brief sliver of history, word geeks like me had better things to do than post lists to the web.

(Afternote: Of course, in the tradition of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the movie Real Life, I'm sure I have ruined the Googlewhack by blogging about it. I welcome comments.)

An Open Query For Linguist Types

It's Halloween again, and a thought just struck me: why isn't "spooktacular" an official dictionary word? It appears in edited prose, it's certainly in widespread use, and could be clued as something like "n. a wild party with a haunted-house or horror theme, esp. one given around Halloween. Jocose." (And of course there's the even more common adjective form.) I'm not saying it's exceedingly common, but I'd at least expect to see it in an unabridged lexicon somewhere.

I guess I'm just asking because I want to know how long the damn word's been in the language. My guess is that it dates to early postwar commercial culture--1946 or so. But unless it shows up in Merriam-Webster with a date next to it, how will I ever know?

Crossword Constructors, Update Your Databases...

Gerhard Ertl wins Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

In Case McSweeney's Doesn't Call Back Again, Like Usual...

Here's a very silly short humor piece I wrote that I'm submitting to McSweeney's Internet Tendency. May be a have-sim, maybe they won't even like it. But what keeps happening is I submit to them and then never hear back. So just so this piece avoids the black hole, here it is for the small number of folks who view my blog.

SUGGESTED ADDITIONS TO THE OFFICIAL SCRABBLE PLAYER’S DICTIONARY, SO MY NEXT GAME WON’T END SO BADLY

FAXT – v. & adj. Archaic past tense of “fax.”

HOGO – n. Very obscure regional British term for a salmon, carp or squid.

ZMIRN – v. To express doubt about something perfectly reasonable because you’re afraid to let other people have fun. Possibly Gaelic.

UNBROIL – v. To reverse the effects of broiling through some process or other.

QAJ – n. An Arabic unit of measure equal to one third of a hogshead.

ASSLIKE – adj. Resembling an uptight person like Jamie who needs to check the dictionary for every little thing.

YAUWOII – n. A genus of theoretical bacteria who also move very fast and no one has seen them. Plural: YAUWOIII.

Worst. Clue. Ever!

I just ran across what I think may be the worst entry, and clue, I've ever seen in a crossword:

Entry: ENRI

Clue: Matisse, to a Cockney

If there's a bounty for finding stuff this bad, I'll take my money now.

Meet the Erhu!

When I moved to New York City and started taking the A train, every so often in the middle of the day on weekends I'd see an old Chinese man playing a strange-looking two-stringed instrument. "How cool!" I thought. "An instrument I've never heard of before!" Here's a link to a video that'll give you a sense of the performance. Just pretend you're on a subway platform, people are conversing nearby, and everything smells vaguely of pee.

Yesterday, while leafing through the introduction to a collection of short stories called San Francisco Noir, I read a sentence that started, "The other day at a bus station I saw a man playing a Chinese fiddle, or erhu."

My eyes gloinked. So that's what they're called! And a quick search on Wikipedia confirmed it. Meet the erhu. Apparently, I'd been staring directly at a crossword puzzle word and had had no idea. And what a word! At four letters, it's actually a bit more useful than the three-letter weird words we're stuck with, and with that letter choice, it's all but begging: "Dave! Please put me running across on the second row down of some wide-open crossword grid of Friday-level difficulty!"

And then a strange thing happened: the word didn't exist. It's there on Wikipedia, it's there in San Francisco Noir. Presumably people in big cities like Chicago have occasion to see them every week or so! But it is not in any dictionary I have access to. Not in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate. Or the New International Unabridged, second or third edition. Not in Random House, not in Chambers. I checked the Webster's New World anyway, but I knew I was licked. Nothing. Apparently, those snotty lexicographers in their high, paper-filled, and incredibly flammable towers, feel that "erhu" does not meet an English linguistic need.

So I'm hereby announcing a new mission: to popularize the word "erhu." I'm going to use it in straight definition ("This weekend the erhu player was back at 59th Street"), in made-up idioms ("Oh, sure, it's complicated, but it's not like juggling erhus,") and metaphors and descriptions ("the sound was eerie, like an erhu being played by a baby vampire"). And when I use it, those of you who have read this post can knowledgeably smile and say, "Ah. The erhu. Thank you, Dave, for your continued selfless work on behalf of the crossword puzzle community." And if anyone wants to put me on a stamp later...well, shucks. You just do what you think best.

Vocabulary Poem: Scacchic

SCACCHIC (SKA-kic). adj. Of or pertaining to the game of chess.

Bobby Fischer, chess god, beat the Reds,
And shortly after, went way off his meds---
Became an anti-Semite, grew a beard,
Indulged in rants both paranoid and weird...
The danger's clear. So why pursue success
In something as obsessional as chess?
The kind of folks whose drives and dreams are scacchic
Are rarely loud or dissolute or bacchic.
But why live life a brainy, zany monk?
I think I'd rather die a whoring drunk.