This Morse code square reads the same across as down:
As it contains no spaces, each line can be read in two ways.
Language
Love/Hate
SENSUOUSNESSES contains only two consonants.
THERE’S NO LOVE LOST BETWEEN THEM contains only two vowels.
In a Word
gongoozler
n. an idler who stares at activity on a canal
Apropos
How many letters are in ACE KING QUEEN JACK TEN NINE EIGHT SEVEN SIX FIVE FOUR THREE TWO?
Fifty-two.
(This also works in Spanish.)
Extensive Mutation Pair
The word EXTENSION can be rearranged into the words ONE, TEN, and SIX.
String together the numbers 1, 10, and 6 and you get 1106.
Add them and you get 17.
The word EXTENSIVELY can be rearranged into the words SIXTY and ELEVEN.
String together the numbers 60 and 11 and you get 6011.
Add them and you get 71.
In a Word
lucubrate
v. to study at night
Thou Whoreson Zed!
What’s unique about this poem?
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find.
It’s the only one of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet.
In a Word
lethologica
n. the inability to remember a word
In her 1989 textbook Cognition, psychologist Margaret Matlin notes that most people who read the definitions below find it hard to summon the words they refer to. How many can you name? I’ll give the answers tomorrow.
- An absolute ruler, a tyrant.
- A stone having a cavity lined with crystals.
- A great circle of the earth passing through the geographic poles and any given point on the earth’s surface.
- Worthy of respect or reverence by reason of age and dignity.
- Shedding leaves each year, as opposed to evergreen.
- A person appointed to act as a substitute for another.
- Five offspring born at a single birth.
- A special quality of leadership that captures the popular imagination and inspires unswerving allegiance.
- The red coloring matter of the red blood corpuscles.
- Flying reptile that was extinct at the end of the Mesozoic era.
- A spring from which hot water, steam, or mud gushes out at intervals, found in Yellowstone National Park.
- The second stomach of a bird, which has thick, muscular walls.
- The green coloring matter found in plants.
- The long-haired wild ox of central Asia, often domesticated as a beast of burden.
- The art of speaking in such a way that the voice seems to come from another place.
Ace
LAWN TENNIS COURT contains all the vowels, in order.
Presumably you’ll find some on the Arabian Peninsula.
A Wide Vocabulary
Doug Nufer’s 2004 novel Never Again is aptly named — in 202 pages he never uses the same word twice. Here’s the first sentence:
When the racetrack closed forever I had to get a job.
And here’s the last (and the moral):
Worldly bookmaker soulmates rectify unfair circumstance’s recurred tragedies, ever-moving, ever-hedging shifty playabilities since chances say someone will be for ever closing racetracks.
It’s an example of an Oulipo exercise in constrained writing — here’s another.