ENGLISH LANGUAGE PLAY
- and more -
for Spanish Speakers
QWERTYUIOP
Spanish-adapted QWERTY keyboard ® ASDFGHJKLÑ
ZXCVBNM
Scrabble ®
Crosswords
¯
American-style grid
British-style grid
Swedish-style grid
Japanese-style gridINTRODUCTION
Charades, riddle-me-rees, cross-references (or keywords, or numbercrosses . . . ), criss crosses (or wordfits . . .), alphabetical jigsaws (or A to Z . . .), word searches, general knowledge crosswords, straight crosswords, backwards crosswords, cryptic crosswords, arrow crosswords (or pointers . . .), anagram crosswords, clueless crosswords, twister crosswords, skeleton fitwords (or back-to-fronts . . .), red herrings, crossed checks, word dominoes, in-verses, transquotations, staircases, quiz-crosses, and what not.
The number of kinds of wordgames in English puzzle books and magazines are countless. More interestingly, they are wittier, more varied, usually more challenging and certainly more fun than in any other language on Earth. Even if other languages do have many kinds, they are limited in a number of ways. One of the many factors that makes this so is that English is undoubtedly the most suitable language for language games (due to the number of available words, letter combinations, letter positions, homophones, homographs, homonyms, monosyllables, foreign words, etc). A little example: Italians are very fond of puzzles, but almost all Italian words end with a vowel, so how can words fit into the last row or the last column in a crossword?
A second important factor is the fact that English linguistics at large is incredibly more advanced, funnier, more interesting and better analysed and understood than any others. Further, even if English-speaking people in general do not usually know other languages in many areas, what is little known here is that they can do wonders with their own language in many aspects in which speakers of other languages simply cannot. In the field of puzzles, they are really able to combine all their kinds of wordgames, and to constantly increase originality and fun. Of course it was them who invented modern-time puzzles. If you can’t believe that English speakers in general are the best linguists in the world in many senses, just take a little example in our field of discussion: cryptic crosswords. They are by far the most difficult crosswords in the world, but the surprise comes when you get to know that there are lots of people in English-speaking countries who like them best and can really solve them. Sometimes the difficulty is further increased by adding extra elements. And there are regularly-published magazines only containing this kind of puzzles. The closest thing I’ve ever come across in Spanish is the definition (just one definition or clue, not a whole puzzle) of ‘café’: Algunos no soportan la amargura de su soledad. But even here, the play is only at one level (soledad: amarga; café solo: amargo - ingenuous but simply one pun). Take three examples from the first cryptic puzzle I’ve come across today, beginning with an easy one - for a native speaker!:
· The clue for ‘down’ is ‘soft feathers on the ground’. ‘Down’ may mean ‘soft feathers’, as in eiderdown - Spanish edredón, from English -, and ‘down’ also refers to the direction ‘to the ground’).
· The clue for ‘foretells’ is ‘Prophesies that the loser felt badly’. Difficult? Of course! But the whole definition is included (prophesies = foretells) and ‘that the loser felt badly’ implies here that the letters of ‘loser felt’ are in a different order, that is, badlly arranged: in fact, ‘foretells’ is the anagram of ‘loser fell’, or vice versa. But in this kind of clue you never know which part is the ‘real’ definition and where the wordplay is.
· The clue for ‘adherence’ is ‘Sticking to this place during wild dance’. (‘Sticking’ refers to the whole word; ‘to this place’ refers to ‘here’, a sequence of letters in the middle of it; and ‘during wild dance’ alludes to the fact that ‘here’ stands in the middle of the letters of the word ‘dance’, but as it is a wild dance, the letters of this word are jumbled (A and D at the beginning, and N, C, E at the end).
And there are lots of different, even wittier kinds of clues in the whole of the magazine, so just imagine how long a Spaniard would take to make one thousand ‘little pieces of linguistic art’ at one go!
In any case, cryptic crosswords are possible - but not created - in any language whose writing is alphabetical. Do you want to think of a word and its clue in Spanish which doesn’t require much effort? Take ARANJUEZ, for instance. It could be like this: ‘El administrador de justicia, una vez pasado el valle leridano, se planta en la ciudad del famoso concierto’ (JUEZ, after ARAN = ARANJUEZ). Requiring much more inventiveness, we could have DECIMA; clue: ‘El grupo sueco de pop actúa de telonero del grupo eléctricamente heavy-metal que está deshecho por un disco compacto, y al final todo suena como una estrofa entre diez de Espinel’. First of all, as these examples prove, it is English that is especially fit for short ‘definitions’. Now let’s unravel the relationship between the clue and the answer word: there is a Spanish stanza (estrofa) called décima or espinela and made up of ten eight-syllable lines which is called after the 16th-century poet and novelist Vicente Espinel, and whose rhyme pattern is “a b b a a c c d d c”. So a Swedish pop group (ABBA) comes before the heavy metal group AC/DC, whose name is further split into two parts by the the letters CD (for ‘compact disc’). The emphasis must be especially on ‘sounds like’, because it is on the rhymes - or rhyme pattern - that the ‘definition’ relies on; and, of course, Espinel ‘clarifies’ the whole, which is strengthened by using the words ‘one stanza out of ten’ (also alluding to the meaning of Spanish décima ‘the tenth part’. Furthermore, there is an allusion to fact that AC/DC took their name from the electrical abbreviation of ‘Alternating Current / Direct Current’.
Can you tackle an easier English puzzle magazine that you can buy with your remaining pounds with your remaining pounds during your trip to London or later at the airport? Of course. There are infinite possibilities, one of which is getting a varied magazine and trying to solve it with the aid of a dictionary. Or getting one for the little ones. Or looking at the most difficult answers while you’re solving the puzzle. And you can give yourself marks by calculating the percentage of squares you got right. Or . . . And, unlike in other languages, in English you will most certainly always find the solutions at the end of the magazine - puzzle magazines indeed have differences depending on the country where they are issued. If you get a foreign-language-learner one, make sure it is not published in Spain or it will very probably contain mistakes and be uninteresting.
Of course playing with words won’t be your be-all and end-all if your only goal is to learn vocabulary, since learning words in a better way requires them to be in context, but it certainly may help to improve your vocabulary at certain levels, especially by making you remember the words of which you previously have an idea.
To give you a third factor, I’ll just remind you that English is one of the very few languages in the world with alphabetic writing (alphabetic writing is a real advantage for more serious things than word play) in which all 26 Latin letters are sufficiently common and have no diacritic signs, ligatures and the like - things like ß, ñ, æ, ã, é, à, û, ð, å, ø and many other letter modifications. Just have a look at Turkish, Czech or Polish, if you like.
Besides, you can expect ‘anything’ in English, from famous nonsense words (like Mary Poppins’ supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, translated into so many languages) to thousands of usual words whose different parts are from very different languages (like ‘pseudointellectually’: its first componet is from Greek, its base form is all from Latin and its ending is native).
Did you know that, just because English naturally tends to absorb any other languages’ cultural words you can find lots of, for example, Qs not followed by Us in a ‘complete’ dictionary. Just a few of them are: qabbala (a mystical representation of the Scriptures), qadi (a Muslim judge interpreting and administering Islamic religious law), qanat (an underground tunnel used to convey water), qat (an Arabian shrub used as a narcotic), qvint (a Danish weight), cinq (the number five in dice or cards), coq (a trimming of cock feathers on a woman’s hat), shoq (an Esat Indian tree), zindiq (a heretic showing extreme infidelity to Islam), burqa (a veiled garment worn by Muslim women), Iraqi (a resident of Iraq), pontacq (a still wine from the South of France, red or white), sambuq (a small Arab boat), shurqee (a south-easternly wind that blows in the Persian Gulf), fiqh (Muslim jurisprudence based on theology), miqra (Hebrew text of the Bible), waqf (a charitable trust in Muslim law). Words with rare letter combinations for the same reason include axolotl (a salamander), bdelloid (like a leech), crwth (an early Celtic musical instrument), ctetology (a branch of biology), dghaisa (a type of small boat found in Malta), dukw (an amphibious vehicle), gmelinite (a mineral), iao (an Australian bird), ioa (a seabird found in the tropics), iynx (a woodpecker), kvass (a type of beer), mbori (a disease in camels), ngege (an African fish, important as a source of food), ouabaio (a southern African tree), qutb (an Islamic saint), as well as sravaka, tjaele, tmesis, tzut, vly, zikr, zloty and what not.
Many people think that there are only disadvantages in the fact that a language writing system - like that of English - does not reflect speech in a one-to-one sound-to-letter correspondence. Actually, as the history of the language proves, English has gained so many advantages from this - even if learning gets less easy. One example is the fact that, (partly) because you don’t have to really adapt foreign words at all levels, English has always borrowed thousands of foreign words to an extent no other language has ever reached in history, which, together with other reasons, accounts for the fact that present-day English is by far the language with the largest vocabulary in the history of the world.
MP Gyles once said,
(. . .) Even I, as an ardent animal lover, must acknowledge that, however eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were born poor but honest. Language makes us unique - and we in this country are born with the privilege of having a unique language as our parent tongue - English, the richest language in the history of humanity.
Our language is rich precisely because it is not pure. Emerson called it ‘the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven’ (. . .)
The curious thing is that English, from a linguistic point of view, is commonly praised not by natives (or Spaniards: Spanish linguists, for example, don’t usually know other languages), but from foreign linguists in general. Another curious point is that ‘purity’ has positive connotations in many languages, although even current physicists and other scientists are learning that ‘impurity’ is better for reality at large and life in particular. For example, if the vertical section of your car tyres were a perfect circle, your car would adhere worse to the road. The Spanish and the French, for example, have always been obsessed by the notion of a ‘pure’ language, which from a linguistic point of view is absurd and unnatural, and contradicts the history of either language - fortunately!.
English is indeed the most astonishing language in the world’s history, with the most linguistic - not only socio-politico-economic, as most misled people here believe - advantages and resources. And English linguistics is certainly a far cry from that in the other countries. One may even wonder how a Westerner can be a linguist at all without a good knowledge of English and Latin. At any rate, the English lexicon, the history of the language and the language itself are a constant source of amazement for linguists.
By the way, did you know that surveys are done for people to vote for the most beautiful word in the English language? ‘Serendipity’ is the answer according to a survey held in Britain in 2000 - a word with a very curious etymology (and meaning: a person’s capacity of usually making happy discoveries by chance).
The following is a very brief introduction to language play in English - with the titles of the sections in alphabetical order - which does not even include such a common genre in Anglo-Saxon culture as limericks. You may find it interesting even if you have never tried to make - in your own language, for example - a long sentence only made up of words with four (or any other fixed number of) letters, trying not to repeat words and make sense - as in ‘Ese día con más sol uno iba por pan sin sal del tío que era tan mal amo’ -, or a sentence beginning with a one-letter word, the second being a two-letter word, the third a three-letter word and so on, also making as much sense as possible, as in ‘A la que tome mucho aceite veremos engordar vanamente’ and ‘I do see that Uncle wanted blacker vehicles repainted’ - from one to nine letters in both these sentences - can you make one from nine to one? Or perhaps you’ve realized that lots of Spanish words and with an -s (above all, plural nouns and adjectives, many verb forms and quite a few adverbs and might want to try and invent longer sentences than this: ‘Años atrás, vosotras dos estabais cansadas, mientras nosotros seis, más relajados, hacíamos las seis tareas encomendadas, antes comentadas, tras las obligaciones laborales diarias, mas después, apenas podíamos, ambos grupos caminábamos contentos tres horas seguidas todos los días, distendidos nuestros cuerpos, distrayéndonos incansables, pues entonces nos conocíamos aquellos largos, preciosos caminos rurales raras veces transitados, menos los itinerarios inaccesibles más empinados, contándonos unas tras otras nuestras experiencias pasadas más íntimas, las futiles preocupaciones, los sueños irrealizables, sanas costumbres perdidas estos días’. The problem is that you cannot use many of the most common Spanish words, e. g. la, el, un, una, que, y, o, and, indeed, de; in fact, hardly any preposition can be used..
1. Abracadabra
This is an old magic word which was used as an amulet or charm to ward off evil spirits and unpleasant diseases. People used to write it on a piece of parchment and wear it round their necks. One especially effective way of writing the charm was like this:
A
B B
R R R
A A A A
C C C C C
A A A A A A
D D D D D D D
A A A A A A A A
B B B B B B B B B
R R R R R R R R R R
A A A A A A A A A A A
In how many ways is it possible to spell out the word ABRACADABRA, starting from the A at the top and always proceeding from one letter to an adjacent one? If you are a good mathemagician, you must have guessed correctly: 1,024.
In English, many other word patterns of different shapes have been created, including a rhombus-shaped one with the sentence ‘Was it a rat I saw’, which can be read backwards as well as forwards.
2. Alphabetical order
‘A’, the fifth most frequent word in English writing (ranking after the, of, and and to, and coming before in, that, is, I, it, for and as) is of course the first in an alphabetical dictionary. On the other hand, ‘zyzzogeton’, one of the rarest, is - at least in a really complete English dictionary like the huge Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, with almost half a million words excluding really technical terms (another 300,000) - the last.
It is really hard to compose a word the order of whose letters is alphabetical - unless it is very short. Try it! ‘Aaegilops’, which refers to a genus of grasses which includes the wild ancestors of domestic wheat, is the longest word you can make up with all its letters in alphabetical order, whereas ‘sponged’ is the longest you can make up with all its letters in reverse alphabetical order.
‘Abscond’ (go away, suddenly, secretly, and aware of having done wrong, especially to avoid arrest) is the commonest word in which the five consecutive letters A B C D E appear in the correct order. There are many of these if we limit ourselves to three or four letters; for example, d e f g: defying; f g h i: fighting; h i j k: highjack; m n o p: monopoly; q r s t: querist; r s t u: understudy; x y z: oxygenize.
3. Anagrams
Two 17-letter words contain the same seventeen letters: ‘misrepresentation’ and ‘representationism’. The are thick English dictionaries of words that are anagrams of other words - those having the same letters but in a different order. If you come to just first names, most of them have anagrams. A few examples are ‘army’ for Mary, ‘breath’ for Bertha, ‘coral’ for Carol, ‘daily’ for Lydia, ‘goal’ for Olga, ‘great’ for Greta, ‘hurt’ for Ruth, ‘ideal’ for Delia, ‘riding’ for Ingrid, ‘road’ for Dora, and ‘sore’ for Rose, among girls’ names; among boy’s names, examples are ‘brain’ for Brian, ‘cigar’ for Craig, ‘events’ for Steven, ‘glared’ for Gerald, ‘line’ for Neil, ‘lyric’ for Cyril, ‘mail’ for Liam, ‘rice’ for Eric, ‘sinned’ for Dennis, ‘smile’ for Miles, ‘vain’ for Ivan, and ‘wander’ for Andrew.
Of course, phrases and sentences also have anagrams. Did you know that ‘eleven plus two’ is an anagram of ‘twelve plus one’? Which ‘makes sense’, since the result is thirteen in both cases! ‘They see’ is a particularly apt anagram of ‘the eyes’. There are hundreds like this, while others have just been serendipitous. Varied examples:
alphabetical I play all the ABC
angered enraged
astronomer moon-starer
conversation voices rant on
(las voces sobreactúan)
degradedness greed’s sad end
desperation a rope ends it
disconsolate is not solaced
(no es consolado)
dormitory dirty room
(dormitorio colectivo)
endearment tender name
(expresión de cariño)
episcopal Pepsi Cola
lubrication act - rub oil in
point on tip
presbyterian best in prayer
revolution love to ruin
saintliness least in sins
schoolmaster the classroom
separation one is apart
soft-heartedness often sheds tears
(suele derramar lágrimas)
suggestion it eggs us on
(nos azuza)
waitress A stew, sir?
(¿Un estofado, caballero?)
Anagrams are amusing when they reflect the meaning of the word or phrase from which they are derived, but they can be even more entertaining when, as antigrams, they take on a contrary meaning. For instance, ‘funeral’ can be transformed into its antigram ‘real fun’. A few more examples:
adversaries are advisers
discretion is no credit (no conlleva una buena reputación)
filled ill-fed
misfortune is more fun
protectionism nice to imports
violence nice love
Anagrams in general are probably the most prestigious kind of language play. It is present in many literatures, and sometimes provokes astonishment. The first one known in history is from the 4th century B.C. from the King of Alexandria’s name, and can be translated from Greek as ‘Ptolomy the Sweetest’. In magical belief, it is even thought that a name contains a kind of omen or premonition - it is said in Latin Nomina sunt consequentia rebus (‘Names are the consequence of things’) and Nomen, omen (‘Name: premonition’); otherwise, your name’s anagram is supposed to tell something about you, which is called onomancy.
Thus, anagrams have been supplied of the names of so many historical characters and events since the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some of them are classics because they seem to fit the person perfectly, even predicting what they actually did in the course of their lives. For instance, from Révolution Française you get in French ‘un veto corse la finira’ (a Corsican veto will put an end to it), ‘obviously’ referring to Napoleon, the French Emperor born in the island of Corsica.
Concentrating on the English language, you may find ‘Flit on, cheering angel’ very suitable for the person if you happen to know about her: Florence Nightingale, the most famous nurse in the history of the world. Certainly, besides, nightingales and angels can flit, that is, move their wings to go here and there! Among the innumerable other witty ones, have these few:
Madame Curie radium came
Clint Eastwood Old West action
Ronald Reagan an oral danger
Dante Gabriel Rosetti greatest idialist born
William Shakespeare I ask me, has Will a peer?
(Yo me pregunto: ¿hay alguien que lo iguale en rango?)
Mary Whitehouse I may rue the show
(Puede que lamente el espectáculo - after all she made notable interventions over theatrical productions of which she disapproved!)
Coming to the rest of mortals, you are likely to have your English and/or Spanish anagrams of your full name. Mine are in several languages, including, the colloquial English ‘Man, a real ace puzzler’ (Tío, un hacha resolviendo juegos de palabras), the Italian ‘La carezza per un male’ (La caricia para un mal) and Spanish ‘Rezuma placer en alza’
4. Cryptarithmetic
When is a letter of the alphabet not a letter? The answer is when it’s a number. In these puzzles each letter represents a different digit. See if you can work it out without looking at the answer. In different puzzles, the same letter may have different values.
SEND
MORE +
MONEY
TEN
TEN
FORTY +
SIXTY
TWO
THREE
SEVEN +
TWELVE
And the answers are:
9567 + 1085 = 10652
850 + 850 + 29786 = 31486
106 + 19722 + 82524 = 102352 or 104 + 19722 + 82526 = 102352
5. Humour, meaning, logic . . .
Pun is a word for word, word humour and word game lovers meaning a humorous use of words which sound the same or of two meanings of the same word, e g ‘A cannonball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms’. Alan F G Lewis, the world’s greatest punster, has turned the pun into a literary form of great style and polish. ‘I’ll be with you -’ represents just one of his punning formulas:
l’ll be with you -
in two shakes, said the freemason
in an instant, said the marketing man
in two sex, said the hermaphrodite
in a trice, said the Third Man
in a flash, said the magician
in half a tick, said vivisectionist
in half a mho, said the electrician
in necks to no time, said the executioner
in a twinkling, eye said.
All the adverbials mean ‘in a moment’, although some of them are spelt in a different way precisely to make a pun (‘sex/secs’; ‘necks/next’), while other words are correctly spelt but are pronounced the same as - or similarly to - others which are fit for the pun (‘shakes/sheiks’; ‘trice/thrice’), and still others rely on a similar device: ‘the twinkling of an eye’ is un abrir y cerrar de ojos, and ‘eye’ and ‘I’ are of course homophones; ‘mho’ is probably used because it is an anagram of ‘ohm’, a unit of electrical resistance, and is pronounced as ‘mo’, i e, ‘moment’; ‘in half a tick’ means ‘in an instant’ but could be also translated as en media garrapata . . .
Tom Swifties are a type of puns based on adverbs or adverbial phrases. They take their name from a character in a series of books by E. Statemeyer, published in the 1920, and they work like this:
‘Turn on the radio,’ said Tom with a short wave.
‘I’ll try to dig up a couple of friends,’ said Tom gravely.
‘The bacon is burnt,’ said Tom with panache.
‘Drop that gun!’ said Tom disarmingly.
‘I can’t find the apples,’ said Tom fruitlessly.
‘I’ve just had an operation,’ said Tom half-heartedly.
(...)
‘Gravely’ plays with the meaning ‘seriously’ and the noun ‘grave’ (the place where a dead body is buried), whereas ‘panache’, depending on its pronunciation, is garbo, salero, or panaché.
Another of the many humorous uses of language is what can be best illustrated with A. Bierce’s famous book Devil’s Dictionary, published more than a century ago. Here are some of its many entertaining entries:
acquaintance a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to
fidelity a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed
misfortune the kind of fortune that never misses
quantity a good substitute for quality when you are hungry
selfish devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others
‘Include me out’ is probably the most celebrated example of Sam Goldwyn’s rare command and use of the English language. Goldwynisms have passed into the language as statements that manage to make sense and nonsense at the same time, and his memorable use of English is sure to give as much pleasure as his films far into the future. Here are just a few examples:
We’re overpaying him, but he’s worth it.
Tell me, how do you love my picture?
If Roosevelt were alive, he’d turn in his grave.
Let’s have some new clichés.
I’ll give you a definite maybe.
A bachelor’s life is no life for a single man.
(Which reminds me of the occasion when Carmen Sevilla exclaimed, ‘¡Dieciocho año, qué edá tan presiosa pa una persona ‘oven!!
‘Military intelligence’ is many English speakers a classic example of an oxymoron (but you may disagree), a combination of apparent contradictions. Oxymorons were originally used as a rhetorical device and are now somewhat proscribed. Collecting oxymorons is fun and develops your feel for language use and abuse. When they are correctly used, oxymorons can be arresting; Tennyson’s lines from ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ are frequently quoted examples:
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faithful unfaithful kept him falsely true.
This could probably be translated (without rhyme and other ‘requirements’ of versification) as:
Su honra en deshonra inhumada se erguía,
y, leal, desleal le mantenía con insincera sincerad.
When they crop up unintentionally the results are often amusing, which often happens with adverbs, as in ‘terribly pleased’ and ‘immensely small’. A lot of them pass unnoticed by all but the word-hunter: ‘Progressive Conservatives’ (a Canadian political party), ‘peerless House of Lords’ (the House of Lords’ members are called ‘peers’, and ‘peerless’ means ‘unique’), ‘left-wing fascism’, and what have you.
As regards metaphors it is worth mentioning mixed metaphors. A celebrated example is in Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy: ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles’. But in everyday speech they often go unnoticed. ‘Galloping inflation’, ‘hogging the limelight’ (apoderándose del foco de atención), and ‘latching on to a new craze’ are typical examples. Only when they produce an incongruous image do they catch our attention. Three noteworthy examples are:
The whole chain of events consists entirely of missing links. (eslabones / nexos)
He is a rough diamond with a heart of gold.
Wild horses on their bended knees would not make me do it
Of a very different nature are rebuses. In Spanish (we do have this), instead of the international (Latin) word ‘rebus’ people use jeroglífico, but actually a hieroglyph (the adjective is ‘hieroglyphic’) is quite a different thing, as you must know if you happen to have an idea about ancient Egyptian writing, which was not alphabetic. Well, let us only have two:
· What is unsettled about this?
WETHER
(Answer: ‘It’s a bad spell of weather’ - mal tiempo or ‘weather’ badly spelt)
· Are they different?
ONE ANOTHER
ONE ANOTHER
ONE ANOTHER
ONE ANOTHER
ONE ANOTHER
ONE ANOTHER
(Answer: ‘Six of one and half a dozen of another’ - which means something like Spanish Los mismos perros con distinto collar)
Returning to puns, English-speaking puzzlers provide you with hundreds of ways, methods, fields . . . Just one final example:
‘What are the disadvantages of each job?’ Look at these to get you started:
‘Accountants are disfigured.’
‘Admirals are abridged.’
‘Advertisers are declassified.’
‘Bankers are disinterested.’
‘Electricians are discharged.’
‘Gunsmiths are fired.’
‘Orchestra leaders are disbanded.’
‘Politicians are devoted.’
‘Puzzlers are dissolved.’
‘Song-writers are decomposed.’
‘Tailors are unsuited.’
‘Teachers are outclassed.’
‘Train drivers are derailed.’
‘Witch doctors are dispelled.’
(‘spell’: hechizo; ‘dispell’: disipar)
Would you like to try in Spanish instead? Continue my list:
· Hay innumerables contables.
· Los fotógrafos tienen que estar siempre disparando.
· Ser bancario no tienen ningún interés.
· El sacerdocio no tiene cura.
· Los electricistas son gente corriente, de pocas luces.
· Los fontaneros quieren ser soldados.
· A los soldados no hay quien los separe.
· Los carpinteros quieren ser maderos.
· Los ganaderos desean haber ganado y tienen que buscar pasto además de pasta.
· Los jardineros te dejan plantado en el trabajo.
· Las asistentas te dejan planchado.
· Los astrónomos son de otro planeta.
· Los rejoneadores no cogen el toro por los cuernos.
English is constantly creataing words - nowadays not only for itself but also for other languages. For example, for over half a century Time magazine has been peppering the language with new words, a good many of which have worked their way into everyday use. Time popularized ‘beatnik’, ‘tycoon’, ‘pundit’ and ‘Sinologist’. Many of the words that are created are particularly fit, economical, funny and successful (think of ‘chillout’, ‘bewilderness’ and ‘phallocrat’, for a start). Have a look at these witty new words, most of them first used by Time:
absobloominglutely
apocalypticians
beautility (beauty+utility)
Californicated
crediholic
(adicted to credit cards, etc, the way an alcoholic is adicted to alcohol)
Disneyfication
lumpengrandiosity
Maocidal
mathemagician
mazemania
megadisaster
Msogamy
occultivated
(cultivated in the occult ‘sciences’)
oligosyllabic
orgasmatron
plantochondriacs
polycopulative
prognosticide
radicalesbian
schleprechaun
sci-fi
(science-fiction, rhyming with ‘hi-fi’)
sci-fireworks
sexscraper
shopaholic
sociohysteric
systemaniac
televangelist
UFOria
(pronounced like ‘euphoria’- a euphoria about flying saucers)
urbanscape (compare ‘landscape’)
verballistics
womandarin
wommanequin
workaholic
Another curious field is people’s full names. Not just that lots of English first names are also ordinary words, like Rob, Bob, Dick, Jack, Ruth and Terry, but some people’s names just make you smile. A few examples:
· Reverend Christian Church, who was active in the Italian city of Florence;
· Groaner Digger, an undertaker from Houston, Texas;
· Rapid Integration, who featured in Newsweek magazine;
· Judge Judge, who administered justice in Pasadena, California;
· Cardinal Sin, the Archbishop of Manila;
· Justin Tune (sounding ‘Just in tune’ - realmente en sintonía / afinado), chorister from the class of 1947, Westminster Choir, Prinston, New Jersey.
6. Keyboard games
Since 1872 English language typewriters and then computers have adopted the QWERTY keyboard (named after the first six letters on the top row). It was developed when the typewriter was in its infancy and inclined to jam if the keys were operated too quickly. The solution then seemed to be placing the letters and combinations of letters which appeared most frequently in English as far away from each other as possible. For commercial reasons and although there are many much better distributions nowadays (the typist works twenty times harder than necessary!), QWERTY is still with us.
But from a word puzzler’s point of view QWERTY does have merits, including the challenge to make the longest word in ‘typewriter order’ - a hard task. The answer is probably the seven-letter word ‘wettish’ (double letters are acceptable).
And could you find the longest (11-letter) words that can be formed with only letters of the top row? Well, they’re ‘proprietary’ and ‘rupturewort’ (a common prostrate Old World herb). And two 8-letter words with those of the second row? ‘Flagfall’ and ‘haggadah’ (explanatory matter in the Talmud and rabbinical literature).
7. Length of words
These twenty-one letter words represent two of the longest English words in regular use - ‘disproportionableness’ and ‘incomprehensibilities’. From then on, word length is in inverse proportion to frequency of word use. Here are examples, with the number of letters:
· interdenominationalism (22);
· honorificabilitudinitatibus (27), which means ‘with honourableness’ and was used by Shakespeare;
· antidisestablishmentarianism (28), a doctrine of opposition to disestablishment (withdrawal of state patronage, support, or exclusive recognition from a church);
· floccipaucinihilipilification (29), which means ‘the action of estimating as worthless’;
· praetertranssubstantiationalistically (37), which can be used for the transformation of bread and wine into the blood and body of Christ during mass in the Roman Catholic faith;
· hepaticocholangiocholecystenterostimies (39), which is the medical term for what you’ve had done if you have had surgery to create new communications between your gall bladder and hepatic duct and between your intestines and your gall bladder;
· Possibly the longest English word to have been advanced is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, with 45 letters, denoting a condition found among miners in particular: it is a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust.
‘Overnervousness’ (15 letters) is the longest word that has no letters that stick up like ‘d’ or ‘l’, and none that stick down like ‘g’ or ‘p’.
8. Letter distribution and combination
‘A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ is a really curious sentence and one familiar to many English-speaking people from when they learnt to type. Have you realized that it contains every letter of the alphabet - it is called a pangram - while only being 33 letters long?
‘Frowzy things plumb vex’d Jack Q.’ is even more curious. Yes, it is exactly 26 letters long, so every letter is used and with no repetitions! A real pangram. And you can make pangrams with 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 ... letters as well. Yes, English is the only language in the world with this and tens of similar things.
Two eight-letter words contain the first six letters of the alphabet. What are they? ‘Boldface’ (negrita) and ‘feedback’.
There are puzzles in which the main challenge takes a number of similar forms like taking out a letter from the word each time or adding one letter to the previous word. Let’s see the latter process. In its simplest form, imagine you have a grid with one square in the first row, two in the second, three in the third and so forth, and that you are asked to think up the word by looking at its definition. But I’m not testing you, so instead let me finish each line with the definition and give you just an example with ‘a’.
a the first letter of the alphabet and the indefinite article
an the indefinite article in its longer form
ang the hairy part of an ear of barley
ange trouble, affliction, anguish
angel a celestial spirit
Angeli a town in Finland
angelic having the nature of an angel
angelica an aromatic plant used in cooking
angelical having the nature of an angel
Angelicals nuns of an extinct order founded in Milan in 1530
You can also play this game in reverse by placing the new letter in front of the first and so on:
e the fifth letter of the alphabet
te a musical note
ate consumed
rate a charge, payment, or price
irate angry
pirate a robber on the high seas
spirate voiceless
aspirate to pronounce with an ‘h’ sound.
There are of course also games in which one extra clue is that each word’s middle letter is arranged alphabetically. For example, you might be looking (with definitions, as in crosswords) for eleven-letter words like these (from A to Z): blokadings, underbought, extractable, screwdriver, adulterated, satinflower ...
9. Lipograms
A lipogram is a written work composed of words chosen to avoid the use of a particular letter. Gadsby, a work by E. V. Wright whose intention was to be ‘a valuable aid to schoolchildren in English composition’, is made up of 50,000 words. Which letter is never used in it? Just the most letter frequently used in English (e), as you can realize from this extract:
Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man of so dominating and happy individuality that youth is drawn to him as a fly to a sugar bowl. It is not gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry monotonous account. It is . . . a practical discarding of that worn-out notion that ‘a child don’t know anything’.
One of the enormous difficulties is of course not even using the commonest of English words: ‘the’.
Outside English, Umberto Eco, the famous Italian novelist and linguist, is among the world’s most famous inventors of lipograms and many other kinds of language play.
10. Numerals
Numerals are the words and phrases that we use for numbers or are related to numbers, such as ‘a thousand’, ‘second’ and ‘two fifths’.
‘Sixteen’ is one of the innumerable (!) numbers (!) which double (!) as words with a second meaning; this one is a place in Meagher County, Montana. ‘Forty-nine’ is a customer in an American diner who leaves without paying. ’Sixty-six’ is a two-handed card game. ‘Seventy-four’ is a type of South African fish. In fact, from zero to twenty-five, all numerals also have a different meaning.
Besides, from ‘one’ to ‘twenty’, all numerals have anagrams in English - not just the shortest like ‘one’ (‘eon’), ‘two’ (‘tow’), ‘three’ (‘there’) an ‘ten’ (‘net’), but also the rest, like ‘fourteen’ (‘neetrouf’ - precisely a slang form of ‘fourteen’), ‘sixteen’ (‘sextine’: a type of poem) and ‘eighteen’ (‘teheeing’: present participle of ‘tehee’ meaning to titter).
All ordinal numbers exist naturally in the language, including ‘hundred and eighty-third’ and ‘zeroth’.
11. Palindromes
Palindromes are chunks of language that are spelt the same both forwards and backwards.
‘Redivider’ is probably the longest everyday English palyndromic word, and ‘rotavator’ is well-established in horticultural circles. If you happen to be a Cree Indian with a penchant for smoking a mixture of dried leaves and bark you’ll be familiar with ‘kinnikinnik’ (eleven letters). In Finnish, a soap-seller passes as the fifteenth-letter palindrome saippuakauppias.
An example of a long witty palindromic text is this - with fifty-one letters:
‘Doc, note I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.’
Among the hundreds of sentences and texts that have been devised, the following is one of the best known - but not of the longest -, and an elegant tribute paid by the author L. Mercer to F. de Lesseps, the builder of the Panama Canal:
‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’ (21 letters)
You may know that two of the best known in Spanish are:
Dábale arroz a la zorra el abad. (25 letters)
Amo la pacífica paloma. (19 letters)
In pseudodromes, however, it is whole words, not individual letters, that can be reversed, like this:
‘Bores are people that say that people are bores.’
‘Dollars make people covetous, then covetous men make dollars.’
‘Women understand men; few men understand women.’
Or my favourite:
‘You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?’
(Puedes enjaular una golondrina, ¿cierto?, pero no te puedes tragar una jaula, ¿a que no?)
12. Repetitions
It is not very hard to find 26 words each containing each alphabet letter twice. Increase the frequency to three and the task becomes significantly more difficult, but it can be done:
a banana n nanny
b bobby o ovolo
c coccyx p poppy
d daddy q Qaraqalpaq
e epee r error
f fluff s sass
g giggle t tatty
h heighth u unusual
i iiwi v viva-voce
j Jijjin w powwow
k kakariki x hexahydroxycyclohexane
l lull y syzygy
m mummy z zizz
An epee or épée is a kind of sword used in fencing; fluff is soft, feathery stuff that comes from blankets or other soft, woolly material; giggle means ‘laugh in a nervous and silly way’; heighth is a dialectal spelling of ‘height’; an iiwi is a brightly coloured bird found in Hawaii; a kakariki is a type of parakeet and also a New Zealand lizard; a lull is an interval of quiet, a period of lessened activity; an ovolo is a rounded convex molding; a poppy is a fragile red wild flower you can easily see in springtime; to sass is to talk impudently or disrespectfully to; tatty is a slang term meaning ‘untidy and shabby looking’; a powwow is a conference of North American Indians; hexahydroxycyclohexane is a chemical component of the vitamin B complex and, as such, essential for life; the syzygy is the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational syastem; and zizz is a whirring sound.
Zizz - and many others, including épée, fluff, iwii, lull and sass, - is also an example of ‘the shortest words which contain the same letter the maximum times’, in this case the least common letter in English. ‘Qaraqalpaq’, the word with the largest number of Qs (none followed by u!), denotes a Turkic people fron Central Asia.
‘Bookkeeper’ is probably the word with the most consecutive twin letters - three. Any letter can be a twin in English, including ‘a’ (as in ‘aardvark’: oso hormiguero), ‘i’ (as in ‘skiing’) and ‘q’ (as in ‘zaqqum’, a tree with bitter fruit, mentioned in the Koran),
English is the language in which you can find all 26 letters in all positions in a word and with the most possibilities of adjacent letters, letter combinations, words beginning and ending with the same letter and so on - one of the features which make it the most varied, interesting language for crosswords and all kinds of puzzles and wordplay. Think, for instance, of that kind of puzzle which is like a crossword but each square is consistently numbered so that each number always represents a different letter. Well, one of the advantages in English is the page layout (you can not only write each letter below the corresponding number but also ring the letter that you have just found out, in a separate letter set), and another is precisely that all 26 letters are used in the crossword, unlike in other languages. In what language can you find one of its rarest letters both at the beginning and the end? ‘Xerox’, for instance, is a common English word for ‘photocopy’ both as a noun and a verb.
Poets have frequently amused themselves writing A-Z verses that each starts with the next letter of the alphabet. The popular children rhyme is a typical example. It begins:
A was apple-pie;
B bit it;
C cut it;
D dealt it;
(...)
More ambitious was the ‘Siege of Belgrade’, a masterpiece of invention which manages to combine the alphabet with alliteration to produce a poem of remarkable, if questionable, consistency. Here are the first four lines:
An Austrian army awfully array’d,
Boldly by battery besieg’d Belgrade:
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction’s devastating doom.
Of course you cannot used an, and, the, to, of, in, it and the other commonest words more than once all through the poem!
13. Riddles
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, was, among other things, a mathematician, the inventor of so many famous riddles and many other kinds of puzzles, and the creator of some interesting, clever, good-sounding words that have entered the language. But let us not centre on his riddles. Instead look at these, both of which are rhyming riddles and as such easier to remember (nor to solve!):
Thirty white horses upon a red hill,
Now they champ, now they clamp,
And now they stand still.
What are they?
Long legs, crooked toes,
Glassy eyes, snotty nose.
What is it?
Glossary:
champ [of horses] bite noisily
clamp hold or fasten (something) tight
crooked [the e is not silent] twisted of bent
snotty [vulgar] with mucus
That’s right - the teeth and a frog, respectively.
14. Scrabble
Do you know what the best-scoring word at Scrabble competitions so far has been (unless I am not updated)? It is ‘bezique’, a card game name - of course together with other words indirectly created, since, as you may know, the best scores are got when so many words are formed, as in a crossword, while you just place your letters on a straight line.
If you are a Scrabble player, you’ll appreciate the value of the two-letter words you’re allowed to play in the game. Gyles Brandeth, the founder of the British Scrabble Championships, has made a study of so many unusual and, in scrabble terms, invaluable words, of which these are a short selection of only those made up of just vowels:
aa a type of volcanic lava
ea a stream
ee Scots form of ‘eye’
io a large Hawaiian hawk
oe a whirlwind
oo an extinct Hawaiian bird
You don’t need anybody else to play Scrabble. You can play alone and try to break your own records (number of final points, number of points in one round, least number of rounds needed to complete a game, etc).
There are lots of games which are somewhat similar to Scrabble. For example, you can buy CubiLetras - sold by Cayro - in Spain. It is a dice game with letters instead of numbers. Supposedly, you are to play against someone else and, for instance, take the points for the letters into account and time yourselves. In fact, the most entertaining way of playing it - and there are so many - that I have found out requires you to play on your own, and not to take any notice of points: you just throw the thirteen dice and try to use all of them (or as many of them as possible) in any number of words that cross in any way as in a crossword, with the aid of a dictionary if you need to check any words, which little by little makes you learn a lot of vocabulary. Again, because all 26 letters of the Latin-English alphabet are used, you’ll be able to normally use them all - although it really doesn’t seem so at first -, but only if you play with English words. The larger your dictionary is, the more words you’ll be able to build up. Two possible advantages over Scrabble are:
- you get in contact with the meaning of words more often;
- you don’t have to spend a long time playing, and you can stop whenever you like.
15. Tongue twisters
Every language community has invented its tongue twisters. Incrdible though it may seem, this is one in Czech: ‘Strč prst skrz krk’, meaning ‘Stick a finger in the throat’, which you can even hear in the Wikipedia, probably the most interesting encyclopedia in the world together with the wonderful Britannica.
To the point. Some English tongue twisters, including a few of the best-known ones are:
Sister Sue sews cheap shirts for Chinese soldiers.
She sells sea-shells by the sea-shore.
Shirley sells Chinese shoes in a small shoe-shop.
A lump of red leather, a red leather lump.
Bob's very best vines are bought in November.
The new nuns knew the true nuns knew the new nuns too.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck would chuck wood?
This is my extended version of one consisting only of the first six words:
Is there a pleasant peasant present to please a present peasant in prison, please?
And this is a recent one - I think - from the Internet, which I’ve modified very slightly:
Six Swedish switched witches watch six Swiss Swatch watch switches. Which Swedish switched witch watches which Swiss Swatch watch switch?
(In translation: Seis brujas suecas transexuales miran los botones de seis relojes "Swatch" suizos. ¿Qué bruja sueca transexual mira a qué botón de qué reloj "Swatch" suizo?)
16. Vowel letters
‘Strengths’ is a nine-letter word that contains just one vowel letter. ‘Rhythms’ is a 7-letter word spelt with no ‘real’ vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u). On the other hand, ‘queue’ is the commonest word with the largest percentage of consecutive vowel letters.
‘Indivisibility’ is the word with the largest number of consecutive sillables with the same vowel letter (still longer: the same vocalic phoneme: / I /). ‘Defencelessness’ has only five E’s but is longer and has no other vowel letters. And ‘strengthlessness’, with 16 letters, is still one letter longer than the latter.
‘Facetious’ and ‘abstemious’ are the commonest of words which contain the five vowel letters in alphabetical order, while probably the commonest of words which contain the five vowel letters in reverse alphabetical order is ‘unsociable’. Among the many others in which the five vowels (in writing) are arranged differently you have anxiousness, encouraging, reputation, euphoria, dialogue, housemaid, ultraviolet.
‘Uncopyrightable’ and ‘misconjugatedly’ (15 letters each) are the two longest words that contain the five vowel letters but in which no letter at all is used more than once.
Univocalics are texts which restrict themselves to the sole use of a particular vowel. Long texts, poems and works have been devised in English without the use of four of the five vowel letters. You can try it in Spanish as well, of course, and you’ll find that the easiest kind is that with the letter ‘a’. You could begin, ‘La santa sábana blanca lavada para mañana, hasta tras la manta barata para la cama blanda, daba a la callada sala, al alba, la gama más ...’ or as you may like. It is only really difficult (in Spanish) with ‘u’ and ‘i’.
17. Word squares
Arrangements of words of equal length that can be read vertically as well as horizontally, which are very difficult to create, have been a source of fascination and entertainment in many languages for thousands of years.
The most frequently quoted ancient example dates from the Roman occupation of Britain. During excavations near Cirencester archaeologists uncovered this agricultural word square which says a lot about the demands of the rural economy 2,000 years ago:
R O T A S
O P E R A
T E N E T
A R E P O
S A T O R
This forms a Latin sentence which translated into English means ‘Arepo the sower controls the wheels with an effort’. This word square has the additional merit of being palindromic: you can read the five words backward or upward, as well as from left to right and downwards.
Nine-letter word squares in English require the use of proper names and really rare words. But here is an example of an eight-letter word square:
A G A R I C U S
G E N E R A N T
A N A C O N D A
R E C A N T E R
I R O N W O R T
C A N T O N A L
U N D E R A G E
S T A R T L E D
And here is a glossary:
agaricus a genus comprising gill fungi which have brown spores and including several members which are edible
ironwort any of several shrubby or subshrubby mints that constitute the genus, Sideritis, often have yellow flowers and whity woolly stem or leaves, and are chiefly native to the eastern Mediterranean region
recanter one that recants, i e, withdraws or repudiates (a statement or belief) formally and publicly
startled gave a shock of surprise to
underage (adj.) of less than mature or legal age; (n.) shortage, deficit
AFTERWORD
Getting to know the world of English puzzles and language play is just one way of discovering the fascinating field of the English lexicon and English language at large as well as English-speaking publishers’ and writers’ excellent use of their own and other languages, without the countless varied confusions, clichés, errors of very many kinds, bad use of such things as letter types (e. g. italics and boldface), lack of interest, disinformation and what have you in the written works published in other countries, among which those dealing with linguistic topics - including any area from textbooks to dictionaries - are paradoxically among the worst even from a purely linguistic point of view - but professionals of other disciplines who can read English and carry out investigation through English usually prefer to tackle English texts, either in printed form or on the Internet. Whatever your career may be, your research work will always be more rewarding if you do it in English, especially from native sources. Of course we are not saying at all that everything that is published in other languages is bad or poor or uninteresting or the like. The point we have been trying to make is that in English, more so than in other languages, good practices are the rule rather than the exception.
Language researchers and aficionados, regardless of political, social, economic and other practical considerations, know that English is the most dynamic, economical (i.e., concise), precise and correctly used language in the world. It is also the one language that allows you, when you have learnt it very well, to know more words and more culture from other languages and communities. And the language with the most possibilities and types of word building processes (including the use of the most number of suffixes and prefixes, as well as having infixes, compounds, conversion or transcategorization, foreign borrowings, back formation, portmanteau words or blends, clipped forms, abbreviations, reduplicatives, familiarity markers, nonsense words, meaningful purely invented words (in literature, in science or by the general public) and other neologisms, nonce-words, eponyms, words based on the pronunciation of related existing words, words created with halves (not affixes) of other existing words, phrasal verbs - together with their corresponding Latin verbs - and nouns derived from them, any mixture of these processess . . . Simply take a look at the phrasal verb in this sentence from a novel by Elmore Leonard:
‘Movie stars, they either seem to fade away or James Dean out.’
If we know that out may mean ‘ending or disappearing’ (die out, blow out the candles, sell out the tickets) as well as the very common fade away, we may translate this as Las estrellas de cine, parece que o se van apagando poco a poco o que se quitan de enmedio a lo James Dean.
And, for example, the language with the easiest and most flexible grammar, which native speakers know how to make the most of, with elements and structures like the varied passive structures, logical relative clauses and infinitive clauses with prepositions, terse verbless clauses, and what not.
Many people don’t really know how fortunate they are in having English as the most international language, and one that is here to stay and will quickly develop and constantly grow and renew itself; that was born very humble - no one could have predicted its present and future enormous development and success at the time when it appeared (some centuries before other European languages) as a provincial tongue in the south-east of England, or even long after William the Conqueror invaded the country from Normandy, in France, in 1066; that people love when they know it well, or can also speak other foreign languages, or are good linguists.
Welcome to the wonders of powerful English.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
These are some books in English wholly or partly dealing with our topic in different ways:
· Language Play, by David Crystal
· Letters Play!, by Richard Whiteley
· Making the Alphabet Dance, by Ross Eckler
· Word Play, by Jim O’Donnell
· The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, by David Crystal
The last-mentioned work, together with The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, by the same author, are probably the best works for anyone with a penchant for good linguistics who is really interested in English and language, respectively -, and require a fairly good level of English on the part of the reader.
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