Word Juggling

Word Juggling

Table of Contents

Introduction

Letter Juggling

SynphonesPentalogs

Heterologs

The Short Synphonairy

Juggling In 3D

Daffynitions

Doubles

False Doubles

Double Takes

Reversible Words and Palindromes

Reversible WordsSelf Reversible Words

Mirror Symmetric WordsClose but No Cigar

Palindromes

The Huge List of Palindromes

My Palindromes

Wordle

Word Juggling

Tom Swifties

Spoonerisms

Hink Pinks

Knock Knock Jokes

Tongue Twisters

Little Willie Jokes

Riddles

Puns on Sayings

Other Bad Jokes

About the Author

Introduction

Playing with words has surely always been a feature of human language. Indeed, one wonders if word play may have not been the impetus behind language right from the start. The invention of writing then greatly expanded the opportunities. As G. K. Chesterton posited in his The Everlasting Man

In the particular case of hieroglyphics…there seems to be serious indication that…writing began with a joke…Some will learn with regret that it seems to have begun with a pun. The [pharaoh]…wishing to send a message up river…found words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun…It must have been great fun to write or even to read these, messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. I suggest…the scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew more and more wild and indefensible.

Language and writing are, of course, very practical and useful activities with very sober purposes and minds behind them. We certainly do not know exactly how writing began and Chesterton’s depiction is how he imagined it, but he makes an important point. We undoubtedly err if we do not or cannot see beyond the seriousness of words, spoken and written, to the playfulness that is also a critical component of language and language use.

This book is a collection of many types of word play; in that it is not unique. The contribution it has to make to the genre stems from who I am as a trained (PhD) physicist. Most physicists would be surprised to be told they are jugglers; nevertheless, jugglers we are. We are especially trained to juggle mathematical symbols and, even more so, ideas about the physical world. But ideas must be expressed as words. Thus, we also become word jugglers with the word play possibilities that implies.

I somewhat arbitrarily divide word play in two: juggling letters and letter positions in words and juggling whole words (more or less). The former I call letter juggling and the later is word juggling. This book follows those designations merely for the organizational utility it provides.

Letter Juggling

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With my sort of background, I have for decades thought of written words as points in a multidimensional, alphabet (or letter) space. That immediately makes room for viewing written words as opportunities for letter juggling. To help you visualize this idea, see the three dimensional graph that soon follows below.

When alphabets were new, many of them lacked symbols for vowels. Most, like Arabic and Hebrew, have now added designators to indicate the appropriate vowel sounds. Word separators, also late additions, are a great help too. Words written wholly without vowels are exceedingly ambiguous, as a glance at the short synphonairy provided shortly indicates. This was especially the case when there were also no word separators (like our spaces between words). For example, what can you make of the following English sentence? Nspnhmtngrgrwhslrwsncv. Without vowels or word separation, reading is simply code deciphering. Now let’s add word separators. Try deciphering n spn h mt n gr gr whs lr ws n cv.. A bit easier? Finally, adding vowels yields something understandable: In Spain he met an eager ogre whose lair was in a cave.

I think of spelling words as finding locations in letter space. Words of three letters length can actually be drawn, and hence visualized, in a three dimensional space. Take the usual 3 axes (xyz) of 3D space and change the numbers along each axis to the alphabet. That is, replace 1 with A, 2 with B and so on. You than have a 3D letter space 26 units on a side and a volume of 26³ (= 17,576) units, each representing a word.

For example, the word ten is the cubic unit located at x = T, y = E and z = N. Every three letter English word then occupies a 1 unit cube in this letter space with the aaa cube at the origin. See the figure below. Of course, some unit cubes, like yyy, do not fit a real English word. It is an interesting and difficult question as to how many real English words have exactly three letters but it must obviously be less than 3²⁶ = 17576. Note we do not bother distinguishing upper from lower case letters.

If we now color blue every cube containing a real English word, what would letter space look like? How many of the 17,576 unit cubes will be blue? At a guess, perhaps 4 to 5 thousand. Will there be discernable patterns in the space? We certainly will see the lines of the pentalogs and heterologs (as below) but will there be more? Who can say? This is letter juggling at its most entertaining..

Synphones

I will call all sets whose elements are words with the same ordered set of consonants by the name synphones. The graph above plots the synphone tn with any of the five vowels in the middle. Another example is the synphone gl. It contains, at a minimum, the set {agile, eagle, gal, gale, gel, guile, goal, glee, ogle, ugly}. I may have overlooked some words so the proper gl set may be larger than the 10 words I list here. Notice that in synphones y counts as a vowel.

Pentalogs

Related to synphones are pentalogs, my word for sets of 5 elements where the elements (words) differ only in a single vowel, each element of the set of 5 having a different vowel. We do not count y as a vowel for pentalogs so there are only 5 vowels. A pentalog (set) must contain five actual English words. If one of the five English vowels does not yield a valid English word the putative pentalog is invalid. Occasionally, a synphone contains a pentalog but most do not. Pentalogs are actually quite rare. By definition then, pentalogs are sets of unisyllabic, rarely bisyllabic, words typically containing just 3 or 4 letters. The tn synphone above is presented as the pentalog tan, ten, tin, ton and tun in the graph but as a syphone it also includes other words in the set, e.g., tiny and eaten. Other examples of pentalogs are:

{bat, bet, bit, bot, but} {bag, beg, big, bog, bug} {band, bend, bind, bond, bund}

{Dall , dell, dill, doll, dull} {Dan, den, din, Don, dun} {flax, flex, flix, flox, flux}

{gat, get, git, got, gut} {lack, Leck, lick, lock, luck} {pack, peck, pick, pock, puck}

{pan, pen, pin, pon, pun} {tan, ten, tin, ton, tun}

The restriction to valid English words is not especially clear cut. Note that Dan, Don and Leck above are nicknames and Dall is a last name but perhaps we can get away with them. The second to last set also reveals the difficulty finding a valid pentalog. I am inclined to reject it because of pon. If the word is admitted as a colloquial form of upon, I think it should be written ‘pon rather than pon. Also, consider the following five words:

{mad, med, mid, mod, mud}

Particularly, med and mod are questionable calls. They are really slang and not proper words. Personally, I’m inclined towards latitude here since strict pentalogs are so uncommon. Word games are games, after all. Being strict in a game is too serious! Then we can also allow the slang word bod and permit as another pentalog:

{bad, bed, bid, bod, bud}

We need not restrict our game to words with a single vowel but then one of the vowels must be constant. As an example:

{dane, dene, dine, done, dune}

The second word, dene, is questionable since it is actually a Navaho word now sometimes used in English, especially in the American SW.

Note that any pentalog with a q in it must pretty much be qu + letter1 + letter2. Such a pentalog word cannot be just three letters long because then letter1 must a vowel and there are no such English words. Then too, it seems there are no fitting English words of four letters. Apparently, q cannot appear in any English pentalog.

Understand that the above gallery of pentalogs is surely not exhaustive. See if you can’t add to it.