Howard W. Bergerson devised these:
As in a word square, the “columns” in each sum are identical with the “rows.”
12/07/2021 UPDATE: Reader James Foster finds that 20 such squares are possible. (Thanks, James.)
Search Results for: in a word
Footloose
A visitor’s description of William Kingston, a Somerset farmer born without arms, recounted in John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876:
He highly entertained us at breakfast, by putting his half-naked feet upon the table as he sat, and carrying his tea and toast between his great and second toe to his mouth, with as much facility as if his foot had been a hand, and his toes fingers. … He then shewed me how he shaves himself with the razor in his toes; and he can comb his own hair. He can dress and undress himself, except buttoning his clothes. He feeds himself, and can bring both his meat or his broth to his mouth, by holding the fork or spoon in his toes. He cleans his own shoes, lights the fire, and does almost any domestic business as well as any other man. … He can milk his cows with his toes, and cuts his own hay, binds it up in bundles, and carries it about the field for his cattle. Last winter he had eight heifers constantly to fodder. The last summer he made all his hay-ricks. He can do all the business of the hay-field (except mowing) as fast and as well with his feet as others can with rakes and forks. … In a word, he can nearly do as much without as others can with their arms.
Kakuro
This logic puzzle is the numerical equivalent of a crossword. Each white cell in the diagram is to be filled with a digit from the range 1-9. The sum of each string of digits must match the “clue” given in the diagram. For example, the clue 29 above means that the four digits to its right must sum to that total. No digit may be duplicated within any entry. Can you complete the diagram?
Still Life
The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus:
In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks. The oblong plate, however, has a clothes peg on it, which expresses a for loop. The fork is a local variable. The fork variable is initialized to 1 within the for loop’s initial-value expression. The sauce with the rubber band indicates that the number of iterations is equal to the function’s argument. The stuff on the cutting board is the loop body. Using a stapler, the fork is multiplied by the sauce and the result assigned to the fork using a drinking glass. A hammer decrements the sauce, which demonstrates that the function’s parameter can be used as a local variable too. Finally, the toilet roll indicates that the return value is the final value of the fork.
That produces a factorial. The program below outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” — it’s just a pillow bearing a piece of paper on which those words are written.
A Bouquet
A surprising number of flowers are named for people:
- begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)
- camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel
- dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus
- forsythia: after Scottish botanist William Forsyth
- fuchsia: after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
- gardenia: after Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden
- magnolia: after French botanist Pierre Magnol
- poinsettia: after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who is credited with bringing the flower to the United States
- wisteria: after American physician Caspar Wistar
- zinnia: after German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn
The ackee fruit of Jamaica is named Blighia sapida after William Bligh, who discovered it in his travels after the mutiny on HMS Bounty.
(Via Maxwell W. Nurnberg, Wonders in Words, 1968.)
Impostors
“Plaindromes” are ordinary sentences that sound as if they ought to be palindromes:
Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.
Stella, Otis deified Satan and Edna.
An item? No, revolt took Natasha.
Eggbert, a wry dross needs seating, tea-grams.
Droop: an old fan? Needles fone a poor ode.
“Ungrams” are invalid anagrams:
Richard M. Nixon / Noxious charmer
Brooklyn Bridge / Good ride by lake
Both were invented by Jef Raskin of Cupertino, California (from the August 2010 issue of Word Ways).
Bad Stanzas
From William Wordsworth, “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”:
Of waistcoats Harry has no lack,
Good duffle grey, and flannel fine;
He has a blanket on his back,
And coats enough to smother nine.
From Charles Wesley, “On the Sight of a Corpse”:
Ah lovely appearance of Death!
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare.
From Richard Le Gallienne, “Beauty Accurst”:
The sleepy kine move round me in desire
And press their oozy lips upon my hair,
Toads kiss my feet and creatures of the mire,
The snails will leave their shells to watch me there.
From John Scott of Amwell, “To a Friend, Apprehensive of Declining Friendship”:
Too much in man’s imperfect state
Mistake produces useless pain.–
Methinks, of friendship’s frequent fate
I hear my Frogley’s voice complain.
From Isaac Watts, “On the Sudden Death of Mrs. Mary Peacock”:
Hark! she bids all her friends adieu;
Some angel calls her to the spheres;
Our eyes the radiant saint pursue
Through liquid telescopes of tears.
In The Stuffed Owl, D. B. Wyndham Lewis quotes this anonymous verse:
I always knew what sort of weather
We were going to have,
For Cynthia never wore her feather
When the weather would be bad.
But when the days were warm and bright
Cynthia wore a feather,
Sometimes black and sometimes white,
The colour doesn’t count whatever.
For Short
In 2007 I posted this cryptic verse by William Whewell:
U 0 a 0 but I 0 U,
O 0 no 0 but O 0 me;
O let not my 0 a 0 go,
But give 0 0 I 0 U so.
You sigh for a cipher but I sigh for you,
O sigh for no cipher, but O sigh for me;
O let not my sigh for a cipher go,
But give sigh for sigh, for I sigh for you so.
In An Almanac of Words at Play (1975), Willard R. Espy offered this addition. What does it say?
Oy OO thO he O
2 On an OO. OO bO
An OO but he never thO
He’d O the OO dealer O
For the OO OO bO.
Say, has OO’s OO brO
OO O that OO sO?
OO’s OO’s good for nO.
Double Duty
J.A. Lindon composed this remarkable pair of monosyllabic poems in 1969. The two read the same, but each has its own rhyme scheme, and each is a distinct acrostic, the first letter of each line spelling out the title.
Cats, Cats, Cats, Cats!
Cats come with mews,
All have sharp claws,
They air their views.
Stray soon from laws,
Climb wall. Each tom
And each mog — grand
Thieves — munch meal from
Scamp’s lunch. Scamp planned …
Chain off, he might
Aim at a rout,
Touch mogs and bite
Such prime bits out!
Chance came. Grey dawn.
At once left mat.
The deuce! On lawn -
Scamp loose — no cat!
Chase ’em, Scamp, Go On!
Cats come with mews, all
Have sharp claws, they
Air their views, stray
Soon from laws, climb wall.
Each tom and
Each mog — grand thieves — munch
Meal from Scamp’s lunch.
Scamp planned …
Chain off, he might aim
At a rout, touch
Mogs and bite such
Prime bits out. Chance came.
Grey dawn. At
Once left mat. The deuce!
On lawn — Scamp loose -
No cat!
(J.A. Lindon and Walter Shedlofsky, “Convertible Acrostics,” Word Ways 2:3 [August 1969], 159-161.)
Roundabout
Poet Alastair Reid arranged unusual words into “garlands,” rings that end where they began:
What is a Tingle-Airey?
A tingle-airey is a hand organ, usually played on the street by the turning of a handle, and often decorated with mother-of-pearl or piddock shells.
What are Piddocks?
Piddocks are little mollusks which bore holes in rocks and wood, or in the breastsummers of buildings.
What is a Breastsummer?
A breastsummer is a great beam supporting the weight of a wall, and sometimes of a gazebo above.
What is a Gazebo?
A gazebo is a round balcony with large windows looking out on a view, often of ornamental gardens and cotoneasters.
What is a Cotoneaster?
A cotoneaster is a kind of flowering shrub, a favorite of mumruffins.
What is a Mumruffin?
A mumruffin is a long-tailed tit which often visits bird tables in winter for its share of pobbies.
What are Pobbies?
Pobbies are small pieces of bread thrumbled up with milk and fed to birds and baby animals.
What is Thrumbled?
Thrumbled is squashed together. Ants thrumble round a piece of bread, and crowds in streets thrumble round gongoozlers.
What is a Gongoozler?
A gongoozler is an idle person who is always stopping in the street and staring at a curious object like a tingle-airey.
Once you’ve traversed the list twice or thrice, he says, “you will be able to use them whenever you wish.”