A self-inventorying crossword from Lee Sallows:
This one even tallies the number of spaces it contains!
(Thanks, Lee!)
Search Results for: in a word
Interloper
The first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) contains a fictitious entry, presumably to catch content thieves:
hink, hinks, hinking, hinked. If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something.
Phony or not, this is a useful word. If it’s adopted widely enough, perhaps the dictionary entry will bootstrap itself into legitimacy.
Ready to Hand
Synonyms for WRITER’S CRAMP collected by Dmitri Borgmann in 1987:
CHIROSPASM
WRITERS’ PALSY
GRAPHOSPASM
SCRIVENERS’ PALSY
MOGIGRAPHIA or MOGOGRAPHIA
PENMAN’S SPASM
WRITERS’ NEUROSIS
HYPERKINESIA
DYSGRAPHIA
WRITERS’ SPASM
A STUTTERING OF THE HAND
MOGIGRAPHIA has four principal forms: SPASTIC, PARALYTIC, NEURALGIC, and TREMULOUS. Borgmann wrote, “No longer need you suffer from the WRITER’S CRAMP of the masses — you can, instead, discourse eloquently and frequently about the plethora of more elegant-sounding ailments that I have made available to you!”
(Dmitri A. Borgmann, “Quelque Chose,” Word Ways 20:1 [February 1987], 44-53.)
Inksmanship
The most prolific author in history may be Charles Hamilton (1876-1961), who could turn out 80,000 words a week writing long series of stories with recurring casts of characters, often set in boys’ public schools. Hamilton wrote under a variety of names and occasionally employed other writers to help with the work, but his own lifetime output has been estimated at 100 million words.
In his 1940 essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell writes, “The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank Richards’ and those in the Gem, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.”
He was forced to add a footnote: “This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’, who are one and the same person!”
Read It Aloud
Center Alley worse jester pore ladle gull hoe lift wetter stop-murder an toe heft-cisterns. Daze worming war furry wicket an shellfish parsons, spatially dole stop-murder, hoe dint lack Center Alley an, infect, word orphan traitor pore gull mar lichen ammonol dinner hormone bang. Oily inner moaning disk wicket oiled worming shorted, ‘Center Alley, gad otter bet, an goiter wark! Suture lacy ladle bomb! Shaker lake!’ an firm moaning tell gnat disk ratchet gull word heifer wark lacquer hearse toe kipper horsing ardor, washer heft-cistern’s closing, maker bets, gore tutor star fur perversions, cooker males, washer dashes an doe oily udder hoard wark. Nor wander pore Center Alley worse tarred an disgorged!
— Howard L. Chace, Anguish Languish, 1956
Memory Span
The peculiar architecture of Echo Bridge, in Newton, Massachusetts, will re-echo a human voice 18 times and a pistol shot (reportedly) 25 times.
In 1889 author Moses King wrote, “The favorite word to hurl at the arch is JULY, and the serious charge of lie — lie — lie is thrown back as vigorously and almost as frequently as if the bridge were a political newspaper in campaign time.”
The Numerosity Adaptation Effect
Fixate on the top figure for 30 seconds and then look at the bottom figure. Though the two circles in the lower figure contain the same number of dots, those on the left appear more numerous. This suggests that the visual system has adapted to the number of items seen in the priming phase, and that, like color, number is a primary attribute of vision.
Psychologists David Burr and John Ross write, “We propose that just as we have a direct visual sense of the reddishness of half a dozen ripe cherries, so we do of their sixishness. In other words there are distinct qualia for numerosity, as there are for color, brightness, and contrast.
“One of the more fascinating aspects of this study … is that although the total apparent number of dots is greatly reduced after adaptation, no particular dots seem to be missing. This reinforces old and more recent evidence suggesting that the perceived richness of our perceptual world is very much an illusion.”
(David Burr and John Ross, “A Visual Sense of Number,” Current Biology 18:6 [March 25, 2008], 425-428.)
Hush-Hush
Wei-Hwa Huang offered this brilliant crossword in the May 2008 issue of Word Ways:
Across
1 Sticks
6 Farm animals
7 Ogles
8 Leisure
9 Ride
Down
1 Soothe
2 Peaceful
3 Reserved
4 Untroubled
5 Pacify
Selflessness
Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:
She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.
She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”
The Clockwise Ant
A problem by Argentinian puzzlist Jaime Poniachik, from the February 1992 issue of Games magazine:
An ant crawls onto a clock face at the 6 mark just as the minute hand is passing 12. She begins crawling counterclockwise around the face’s circumference at a uniform speed. When the minute hand passes her, she reverses course and crawls clockwise without changing her speed. Forty-five minutes after her first encounter with the minute hand, it passes her a second time and she departs. How much time did she spend on the clock face?