Its object is alphabetic series like rot sot tot, row sow tow, root, soot toot.  If “gnat” were spelled rite, I could make a four word series: mat, nat, oat, pat.  Three is the best I’ve done, and one of four-letter words the one with the longest words.  My favorite so far is nut, out, put because it has a word beginning with a vowel.

This may  be the worst word-game I’ve come up with.  Gotta have something here, though.

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I came up with another ridiculous word-game the other day.  It’s dependent on the . . . four letters below:

They allow one set of four letters to spell “clot” and “dot” and another to spell “stern” and “stem.”  The object of the game is to see how many sets of four letters can spell two words without changing their order.  I found six others using the c and l, but haven’t tried for more with the other two.  Whee.

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Recently Richard Kostelanetz came up with a new word game he told friends about.  Rule: find word-pairs each of the words in which is spelled the same as the other but pronounced differently and has a significantly different meaning.

Richard supplied two:

read

tear

John Bennett added one

lead

Five from from Elaine Bern but two never made it to me:

bow

do

bass

I struggled but eventually wrote Richard that I’d come up with a handful, “But they are two syllable in length and you may have asked for one-syllable words.  Anyway, I suspect two-syllable words of this kind are much more common than one-syllable words.”  My words (which by then I had learned from Doug Puchowski are apparently called hetronyms):

content

object

entrance

defect

combine.

collect (Christian liturgy term)

I think the first three are particularly resonant.  Anyway, thanks for giving me another fascinating forest in the English language to wander into.  “Perfect,” adjective and verb, seem to me too similar in meaning to qualify.

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My mind is blank, so to get an entry posted today, I’m just going to describe (not for the first time, I’m sure) a word game I’ve been playing for a long time.  One’s goal is to find 5 words using each of the standard five long-vowels sounds.  For example, stole, stale, stele, style, stool.  Extra credit for these if “stole” had been spelled “stule.”  Thinking about “stool” made be think of “ool” words.  “Wool” was the first one I thought of.  I soon realized that I knew of no other “ool” word that rhymed with it.  The way people are regularizing spelling now–by discarding such great words as “dove,” “throve” and “strove,” we’ll no longer have the fun of wool-oddities to smile at.

I wonder when I’m going to first read the sentence, “He drived directly home from work,” in a mainstream periodical.  The accuracy of communication will be improved at the expense of its full expressiveness.

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I was knocked off the Internet until late today, 22 April.  I.m still having trouble with my e.mail in case anyone’s tried in vain to send something to me.  I worked up blog entries daily, though.  Here’s the first:

Being a friend of Richard Kostelanetz’s means being exposed to an incredible flow of word-game inventiveness.  Some recent play of his with letter-shifting inspired me to the following:

peals

pleas

pales

and:

bread

bared

beard.

After much thought on more than one day, I’ve been unable to think of any other such sets.  (A difference between Richard and me is that he’d accept something like “spared/ speard/spread”; I can’t.)

Another day I thought of a word-challenge new to me: seeing how long a sentence one can make without repeating any of its letters.  I thought I did pretty well with my first: “Thin dogs are plucky.”  Later I did better: “Plucky thin dogs vex farm.”  The only letters missing are b, j, q, w and z.  Not the greatest sentence, though . . .
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Today a silly game: try to find 26 words each of which contain a different letter of the alphabet that is silent (by itself) in that word. Example: “clean,” in which the letter a is silent.  The following list contains the words for each of twelve letters I’ve so far found:

A: clean

B: bomb

C: scent

D:

E: lame

F:

G: sign

H: who

I:

J:

K: knowledge

L: balm

M:

N: column

O:

P: psychology

Q:

R:

S:

T: filet

U:

V:

W:

X:

Y: day

Z:

I’m sure there are more, but have hit a wall on the game.  any additions gratefully accepted, and will be credited to the ones supplying them.  Okay, No I’m going off the Internet and my not be back for a while because I need to take my CPU to a technician to be looked at.  I have stopped receiving e.mail–except for spam!  The company handling my e.mail, Birch Communications, feels the problem is not at their end but in my computer.

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