6 LETTER WORD: P U S M P L

6 LETER WORD: PLUMPS

5 LETTER WORDS
SLUMP
PUMPS
PULPS
PLUMS
PLUMP
LUMPS

4 LETTER WORDS
UMPS
SUMP
SLUM
PUPS
PUMP
PULP
PLUS
PLUM
LUMP

3 LETTER WORDS
UPS
UMP
SUP
SUM
PUS
PUP
MUS

6 LETTER WORD: D H E S G U

Tips for finding the longest word in a 6 or 7 letter word jumble.

Look at the letters. If there's an ING, put that at the end, then see what word the rest of the letters make. Similarly, if there's an S and H, put those at the end with one or the other of the vowels. Even if it isn't the end of the word, you can generall see what it is, as for example the letters above for G U S H E D

6 LETTER WORD
GUSHED

4 LETTERS QORDS
USED
SUED
SHED
HUGS
HUGE
HUES
HUED
GUSH
DUES

3 LETTER WORDS
USE
UGH
SUE
SHE
HUG
HUE
HES
DUH
FUG
DUE

6 LETTER WORD: S L O T L A

6 LETTER;
ATOLLS
ALLOTS

5 LETTER
TOLS
STALL
ATOLL
ALTOS
ALLOT

4 LETTER
TOLL
TALL
SLOT
SLAT
SALT
OATS
LOTS
LOST
LAST
ALTO
ALSO

3 LETTER
SOT
SOL
SAT
OAT
LOT
ALL

Scrabble pt 6

Club and tournament play
Tens of thousands play club and tournament Scrabble worldwide. The intensity of play, obscurity of words, and stratospheric scores in tournament games may come as a shock to many parlor players. All tournament (and most club) games are played with a game clock and a set time control. Almost all tournament games involve only 2 players; typically, each has 25 minutes in which to make all of his or her plays. For each minute by which a player oversteps the time control, a penalty of 10 points is assessed. The number of minutes is rounded up, so that if a player oversteps time control by two minutes and five seconds, the penalty is 30 points. In addition, the players use special tiles called Protiles which, unlike wooden tiles, are not engraved thereby eliminating the potential for a cheating player to "Braille" (feel for particular tiles, especially blanks, in the bag).

Players are allowed "tracking sheets", preprinted with the letters in the initial pool, from which tiles can be crossed off as they are played. Tracking tiles is an important aid to strategy, especially during the endgame, when no tiles remain to be drawn and each player can determine exactly what is on the opponent's rack.

The most prestigious (regularly held) tournaments include:
The World Scrabble Championship: held in odd years, the last was in Johor Bahru, Malaysia in 2009.
The National Scrabble Championship: an open event attracting several hundred players, held around July/August every year or two, most recently in Dallas, Texas on August 7–11, 2010.
The Brand's Crossword Game King's Cup: the largest tournament in the World. Held annually around the end of June or beginning of July.

Other important tournaments include:
The World Youth Scrabble Championships: entry by country qualification, restricted to under 18 years old. Held annually since 2006.
The National School Scrabble Championship: entry open to North American school students. Held annually since 2003.
The Canadian Scrabble Championship: entry by invitation only to the top fifty Canadian players. Held every two to three years.
Clubs in North America typically meet one day a week for three or four hours and some charge a small admission fee to cover their expenses and prizes. Clubs also typically hold at least one open tournament per year. Tournaments are usually held on weekends, and between six and nine games are played each day. Detailed statistics on tournaments and players in North America can be found at www.cross-tables.com.

There are also clubs in the UK and many other countries. A list of internationally rated SOWPODS tournaments can be found on the web.

During off hours at tournaments, many players socialize by playing consultation (team) Scrabble, Clabbers, Anagrams, Boggle and other games.

Computer players
Maven is a computer opponent for the game, created by Brian Sheppard. The official Scrabble computer game in North America uses a version of Maven as its artificial intelligence and is released by Atari. Outside of North America, the official Scrabble computer game is released by Ubisoft. Quackle is an open-source alternative to Maven of comparable strength.

Console and computer video game versions
Several computer and video game versions of Scrabble have been released for various platforms, including PC, Mac, Amiga, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, iPod, iPad, Game.com, Palm OS, Amstrad CPC, Xbox 360, Kindle and mobile phones.

The Nintendo DS version of Scrabble 2007 Edition made news when parents became angry over the game's AI using coarse language during gameplay.

Scrabble on the Internet
A number of sites offer the possibility to play Scrabble online against other users. The game is available to play for free at www.pogo.com, part of Electronic Arts. The Internet Scrabble Club (ISC) "www.isc.ro" , which is free of charge, is frequented continuously by thousands of players, including many of the game's most renowned experts. The social networking site Facebook had offered an online variation of Scrabble called Scrabulous as a third-party application add-on. On January 15, 2008, it was reported that Hasbro and Mattel were in the process of suing the creators of Scrabulous for copyright infringement. On July 24, 2008, Hasbro filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the creators of Scrabulous. On July 28, 2008 the Scrabulous Facebook application was disabled for users in North America, eventually re-appearing as "Lexulous" in September 2008, with changes made to distinguish it from Scrabble. On December 20, 2008 Hasbro withdrew their lawsuit against RJ Softwares.

Mattel launched its official version of online Scrabble, Scrabble by Mattel on Facebook in late March 2008. The application was developed by Gamehouse, a division of RealNetworks who has been licensed by Mattel.[18] However since Hasbro controls the copyright for North America with the copyright for the rest of the world belonging Mattel, the Facebook application is available only to players outside the United States and Canada. Ownership of the rights to Scrabble by multiple companies is limiting the introduction of the game to Facebook[18] and, between its launch date and April 6, 2008, fewer than 2000 users had registered, compared with 600,000 registered Scrabulous users.

As of November 3, 2008, the official Facebook Scrabble game has 203,644 monthly active users. The new "official" application has been heavily criticised in Facebook reviews, particularly by former users of the Scrabulous application which allowed American and Canadian users to play opponents in other countries, which is no longer possible: the Scrabble Beta application is only available in the USA and Canada, whereas Scrabble Worldwide is only available to other countries.

Some have complained that they have been unable to use the new application due to technical bugs and glitches, and many have criticized Hasbro for failing to reach an agreement with Scrabulous developers. In addition, the Facebook version only allows automatic verification of words, making it impossible to play invalid words, and making challenges redundant.

RealNetworks has stated that the application is currently in its beta stage and there have been reports of a number of bugs and limitations. The Original Scrabble now exists on Facebook, and was developed by Electronic Arts.

Scrabble pt 5

Challenges
The penalty for a successfully challenged play is nearly universal: the offending player removes the tiles played and forfeits the turn. (However, in some online games, an option known as "void" may be used, wherein unacceptable words are automatically rejected by the program. The player is then required to make another play, with no penalty applied.)

The penalty for an unsuccessful challenge (where all words formed by the play are deemed valid) varies considerably, including:

The "double challenge" rule, in which an unsuccessfully challenging player must forfeit the next turn. This penalty governs North American (NASPA-sanctioned) tournaments, and is the standard for North American, Israeli and Thai clubs. Because loss of a turn generally constitutes the greatest risk for an unsuccessful challenge, it provides the greatest incentive for a player to "bluff", or play a "phony" – a plausible word that they know or suspect to be unacceptable, hoping their opponent will not call them on it. Players have divergent opinions on this aspect of the double-challenge game and the ethics involved, but officially it is considered a valid part of the game.
A pure "single challenge" or "free challenge" rule, in which no penalty whatsoever is applied to a player who unsuccessfully challenges. This is the default rule in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, as well as for many tournaments in Australia, although these countries do sanction occasional tournaments using other challenge rules.
A modified "single challenge" rule, in which an unsuccessful challenge does not result in the loss of the challenging player's turn, but is penalized by the loss of a specified number of points. The most common penalty is five points. The rule has been adopted in Singapore (since 2000), Malaysia (since 2002), South Africa (since 2003), New Zealand (since 2004), and Kenya, as well as in contemporary World Scrabble Championships (since 2001). Some countries and tournaments (including Sweden) use a 10-point penalty instead. In most game situations, this penalty is much lower than that of the "double challenge" rule; consequently, such tournaments encourage a greater willingness to challenge and a lower willingness to play dubious words.

Historic evolution of the rules
The North American "box rules" (that are included in each game box, as contrasted with tournament rules) have been edited four times: in 1953, 1976, 1989, and 1999.

The major changes in 1953 were as follows:
It was made clear that words could be played through single letters already on the board.
It was made clear that a player could play a word parallel and immediately adjacent to an existing word provided all crosswords formed were valid.
It was made clear that the effect of two word premium squares were to be compounded multiplicatively.
The previously unspecified penalty for having one's play successfully challenged was stated: withdrawal of tiles and loss of turn.
The major changes in 1976 were as follows:

It was made clear that the blank tile beats an A when drawing to see who goes first.
A player could now pass his/her turn, doing nothing.
A loss-of-turn penalty was added for challenging an acceptable play.
If final scores are tied, the player whose score was highest before adjusting for unplayed tiles is the winner.
The editorial changes made in 1989 did not affect game play.

The major changes in 1999 were as follows:
It was made clear that a tile can be shifted or replaced until the play has been scored.
It was made clear that a challenge applies to all the words made in the given play.
Playing all seven tiles is officially called a "Bingo".
In what was certainly an editorial blunder, it was made clear that a player can form more than one word in one row on a turn.

6 LETTER WORD: D S U R I A

6 LETTER WORD: RADIUS

3 LETTER WORDS
ADS
AID
AIR
DIS
DS
RAD
RID
SAD
SIR
AIDS

4-LETTER WORDS
AIRS
ARID
DAIS
RADS
RAID
RIDS
SAID
SARI

5 LETTER WORD
RAIDS

6 LETTER WORD: D E W I L L

6 LETTR WORD : WILLED

3 LETTER WORDS:
DEW
DIE
ELL
ILL
LED
LEI
LID
LEI
LID
LIE
WED
DELI
DELL
DILL
IDLE
LEWD
LIED
WELD
WELL
WIDE
WILD
WILE
WILL
DWELL

5 LETTER WORDS
WIELD
WILED

Scrabble pt 4

Acceptable words
Acceptable words are the primary entries in some chosen dictionary, and all of their inflected forms. Words that are hyphenated, capitalized (such as proper nouns), or apostrophized are not allowed, unless they also appear as acceptable entries: "Jack" is a proper noun, but the word JACK is acceptable because it has other usages (automotive, vexillological, etc.) that are acceptable. Acronyms or abbreviations, other than those that have been regularized (such as AWOL, RADAR, LASER, and SCUBA), are not allowed. Variant spellings, slang or offensive terms, archaic or obsolete terms, and specialized jargon words are allowed if they meet all other criteria for acceptability.

There are two popular competition word lists used in various parts of the world: TWL and SOWPODS (also referred to as "Collins"). The North American 2006 Official Tournament and Club Word List, Second Edition (OWL2), became official for use in American, Canadian, Israeli and Thai club and tournament play on March 1, 2006 (or, for school use, the bowdlerized Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition (OSPD4)). Early printings of OWL2 and OSPD4 must be amended according to corrigenda posted at the National Scrabble Association web site. North American competitions use the Long Words List for longer words.

The OWL2 and the OSPD4 are compiled using four (originally five) major college-level dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster (10th and 11th editions, respectively). If a word appears (or historically appeared) in at least one of the dictionaries, it is included in the OWL2 and the OSPD4, unless the word has only an offensive meaning, in which case it is only included in the OWL2. The key difference between the OSPD4 and the OWL2 is that the OSPD4 is marketed for "home and school" use, and has been expurgated of many words which their source dictionaries judged offensive, rendering the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary less fit for official Scrabble play. The OSPD4 is available in bookstores, whereas the OWL2 is only available from the National Scrabble Association's retail website wordgear.com (as of July 2009, NSA membership is no longer required to purchase the OWL).

In all other countries the competition word list is the Tournament and Club Word List (Collins) published in May 2007 (see SOWPODS), which lists all words of from 2 to 15 letters and is thus a complete reference. This list contains every word in the OWL2 mentioned above plus words sourced from Chambers and Collins English dictionaries. This book is used to adjudicate at the World Scrabble Championship and all other major international competitions outside of North America.

Scrabble the Game, Part 3

Sequence of play
Before the game, the letter tiles are either put in an opaque bag or placed face down on a flat surface. Opaque cloth bags and customized tiles are staples of clubs and tournaments, where games are rarely played without both.

Next, players decide the order in which they play. The normal approach is for players to draw tiles: the player who picks the letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet goes first (with blank tiles ranked higher than A's). In North American tournaments, the rules of the US-based North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) stipulate instead that players who have gone first in the fewest number of games in the tournament have priority, or failing that, those who have gone second the most. In the case of a tie, tiles are drawn as in the standard rules.

At the beginning of the game, and after each turn until the bag is empty (or until there are no more face-down tiles), players draw tiles to replenish their "racks", or tile-holders, with seven tiles, from which they will make plays. Each rack is concealed from the other players.

During a turn, a player will have seven or fewer letter tiles in their rack from which to choose a play. On each turn, a player has the option to:
(1) pass, forfeiting the turn and scoring nothing;
(2) exchange one or more tiles for an equal number from the bag, scoring nothing, an option which is only available if at least seven tiles remain in the bag; or
(3) form a play on the board, adding its value to the player's cumulative score.

A proper play uses any number of the player's tiles to form a single continuous word ("main word") on the board, reading either left-to-right or top-to-bottom. The main word must either use the letters of one or more previously played words, or else have at least one of its tiles horizontally or vertically adjacent to an already played word. If words other than the main word are newly formed by the play, they are scored as well, and are subject to the same criteria for acceptability.

When the board is blank, the first word played must cover H8, the center square. The word must consist of at least two letters, extending horizontally or vertically. H8 is a premium square, so the first player to play a word receives a double score.

A blank tile may take the place of any letter. It remains as that letter thereafter for the rest of the game. Individually, it scores no points regardless of what letter it is designated, and is not itself affected by premium tiles. However, its placement on a double-word or triple-word square does cause the appropriate premium to be scored for the word in which it is used. While not allowed in official or tournament play, a common "house rule" allows players to "recycle" blank tiles by later substituting the corresponding letter tile.

After playing a word, the player draws letter tiles from the bag to replenish their rack to seven tiles. If there are not enough tiles in the bag to do so, the player takes all of the remaining tiles.

After a player plays a word, their opponent may choose to challenge any or all the words formed by the play. If any of the words challenged is found to be unacceptable, the play is removed from the board, the player returns the newly played tiles to their rack and their turn is forfeited. In tournament play, a challenge is to the entire play rather than any one word, so a judge (human or computer) is used, and players are not entitled to know which word or words caused the challenge to succeed. Penalties for unsuccessfully challenging an acceptable play vary within club and tournament play, and are described in greater detail below.

With North American rules, the game ends when (1) one player plays every tile in their rack, and there are no tiles remaining in the bag (regardless of the tiles in their opponent's rack); or (2) when six successive scoreless turns have occurred and the score is not zero-zero.

When the game ends, each player's score is reduced by the sum of his/her unplayed letters. In addition, if a player has used all of his or her letters, the sum of the other player's unplayed letters is added to that player's score; in tournament play, a player who "goes out" adds double this sum, and the opponent is not penalized.

Scoreless turns can occur when a player passes, when a player exchanges tiles, or when a player loses a challenge. The latter rule varies slightly in international tournaments.

6 LETTERS: D R N E V E

6 lETTER WORD: VENDER or NERVED

3 LETTER WORDS
DEN
END
ERE
EVE
NEE
RED
REV
DEER
EVEN
EVER
NEED
NERD
REED
REND
VEER
VEND

5 LETTER WORDS
NERVE
NEVER

6 LETTERS: O R O S M B

6 LETTER WORD: BROOMS

3 LETTER WORDS
BOO
BRO
MOB
MOO
OMS
ORB
ROB
SOB

4 LETTER WORDS
BOOM
BOOR
BOOS
BROS
MOBS
MOOR
MOOS
ORBS
ROBS
ROOM

5 LETTER WORDS
BOOMS
BOORS
BOSOM
BROOM
MOORS
ROOMS

Scrabble: the Game, pt 2

Game details
The game is played by two to four players on a square (or nearly square) board with a 15-by-15 grid of cells (individually known as "squares"), each of which accommodates a single letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is always between two players (or, occasionally, between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack).

The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: dark red "triple-word" squares, pink "double-word" squares, dark blue "triple-letter" squares, and light blue "double-letter" squares [In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premiums squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL]. The center square (H8) is often marked with a star or logo, and counts as a double-word square.

The game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in standard English writing; commonly used letters such as E or O are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed.

Notation system
In the notation system common in tournament play, columns are labeled "A-O" and rows "1-15". A play is usually identified in the format xy WORD score or WORD xy score, where x denotes the column or row on which the play's main word extends, y denotes the second coordinate of the main word's first letter, and WORD is the main word. Although unnecessary, additional words formed by the play are occasionally listed after the main word and a slash. In the case where the play of a single tile formed words in each direction, one of the words is arbitrarily chosen to serve as the main word for purposes of notation.

When a blank tile is employed in the main word, the letter it has been chosen to represent is indicated with a lower case letter, or, in handwritten notation, with a square around the letter. Parentheses are sometimes also used to designate a blank, although this may create confusion with a second (optional) function of parentheses, namely indication of an existing letter or word that has been "played through" by the main word.

Example 1:

A(D)DITiON(AL) D3 74

(played through the existing letter D and word AL, using a blank for the second I, extending down the D column and beginning on row 3, and scoring 74 points)

6 LETTERS: E D F M A O

6 LETTER WORD - FOAMED

3 LETTER WORDS
ADO
DAM
DOE
EAD
FOE
MAD
MED
MOD
OAE
ODE

4 LETTER WORDS
DAME
DEAF
DEMO
DOME
FADE
FAME
FOAM
MADE
MEAD
MODE

5 LETTER WORDS
FAMED

6 letters: S V G O E L

6 LETTER WORD: GLOVES

3 LETTER WORDS
EGO
GEL
LEG
LOG
OLE
SOL
VEG

4 LETTER WORDS
EGOS
GELS
GOES
LEGS
LOGE
LOGS
LOSE
LOVE
OGLE
SLOE
SLOG
SOLE
VOLE

5-LETTER WORDS
GLOVE
LOGES
LOVES
OGLES
SOLVE
VOLES

Scrabble: History of the Game, pt 1

I'm currently trying to create a scrabble club in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and with it constantly in my mind, I thought I'd do a series of posts on the game.

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works (e.g. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) provide a list of permissible words. The Collins Scrabble checker can also be used to check if a word is allowed.

The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and of Mattel elsewhere. The game is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions. One hundred and fifty million sets have been sold worldwide, and sets are found in one out of every three American homes.

History
Alfred Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various length, using examples in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times. This was used to determine the number and scores of tiles in the game.In 1938, architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out meticulously performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources including The New York Times. The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15-by-15 game board and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.

In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut — and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game — bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. Though he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the "premium" squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also changed the name of the game to "Scrabble," a real word which means "to scratch frantically." In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year, but lost money.

According to legend, Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Strauss, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order and within a year, "everyone had to have one." In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter (one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the game).

Selchow & Righter bought the trademark to the game in 1972.[9] JW Spears began selling the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. The company is now a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc. In 1986, Selchow and Righter sold the game to Coleco, who soon after went bankrupt. The company's assets, including Scrabble and Parchesi, were purchased by Hasbro.

In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC. Scrabble ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993. The show was hosted by Chuck Woolery. The tagline of the show in promo broadcasts was, "Every man dies; not every man truly Scrabbles."

Isaac Asimov - Word Gamer

Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) is most famous for his science fiction writing, and his non-fiction science popularization. He also wrote mystery short stories, in particular a series called The Black Widowers, published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

The Black Widowers are a group of men - a patent lawyer, an artist, a writer, a government code expert, a math teacher, who meet at a restaurant once a month, where they are waited on by Henry. At each gathering, one of these brings a guest...who invariably has some kind of mystery for the gathering to solve...and it is always Henry who solves it, after the other members have discussed the problem from all angles.

The mysteries are very trivial - only once or twice in the 50 or so stories is there a murder. Sometimes it's an actual crime, at other times it's just a mystery on human behavior.

For example in one story, an editor for a publishing house has lost a manuscript. He thought the author - speaking on the phone - had said, "I'll bring the manuscript tomorrow," when what he actually said was "I"ll bring the manuscript to Morrow." (Morrow was a publishing house active during the time this story was published.)

"To the Barest" is a story that will please punsters and anagramsters.

In it, a character named Ralph Ottur has just died. Ottur's emblem is an otter holding a fish in its mouth - and the fish is a trout. (Which is an anagram of ottur.) So it's a visual pun as well as an anagram.

I heartily recommend the first three Black Widower anthologies. (There are five - the last two have rather weak stories, in my opinion, but the early ones are fun.)


Tales of the Black Widowers
More Tales of the Black Widowers
Casebook of the Black Widowers
Banquets of the Black Widowers
Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Crispinisms 1: British English and usage from the 1950s

Since I'm reading Edmund Crispin's anthology Beware of the Trains, I thought I'd share some of his vocabulary.

A whistle blew; jolting slightly, the big posters on the hoardings took themselves off rearwards....

hoardings - In the US, the act of a person who hoards, or a temporary fence enclosing a construction site.

In British English, it's a billboard.

"to have a dekko" - slang for, "to take a look". According to The Free Dictionary: [from Hindi dekho! look! from dekhnā to see]

Crispin, like most British authors, also uses the occasional French phrase. (The following is from a story that was written in the late 1940s or early 1950s:

He was perhaps fifty-five; small, as policemen go, and of a compact build which the neatness of his clothes accentuated. The close-cropped greying hair, the pink affable face, the soldierly bearing, the bulge of the cigar-case in the breast pocket and the shining brown shoes--these things suggested the more malleable sort of German petit bourgeois; to see him close at hand, however, was to see the grey eyes-bland, intelligent, sceptical-which effectively belied your first, superficial impression, showing the iron under the velvet.

What's a petit bourgeois? Well, according to dictionary.com, it's "a person who belongs to the petite bourgeoisie."

Thanks, loads.

So, what's a the petite bourgeoisie? "the portion of the bourgeoisie having the least wealth and lowest social status; the lower middle class."

And the bourgeoisie?

(in Marxist theory) the class that, in contrast to the proletariat or wage-earning class, is primarily concerned with property values.

or
1. a member of the middle class.
2. a person whose political, economic, and social opinions are believed to be determined mainly by concern for property values and conventional respectability.
3. a shopkeeper or merchant.

It's pronounced: boor-zhwah, by the way, and is a derivative of burgess, which evolved from the German word for city.

Murder Words

Edmund Crispin (1921-1978) wrote mystery novels. His detective was Gervase Fen. A defining mark of Crispin's novels is that most people need to have a dictionary close by when they read them (I know I did - I've read them all now and have introduced quite a few new words to my vocabulary) because he seems to take a positive joy in showing off his erudition. Not that there's anything wrong with that - he used words that evoked exactly what he meant to say (and his detective was a professor of English) and what's wrong with getting an education in the English language as well as enjoying a mystery story?

Tonight I was re-reading a short story called "Within the Gates", published in Beware of the Trains. The "reveal" of the story was that there was a difference between the word "cryptogam" and "cryptogram".

A cryptogram is, of course, "a message or writing in code or cipher; cryptograph".

A cryptogam is "any of the Cryptogamia, a former primary division of plants that have no true flowers or seeds and that reproduce by spores, as the ferns, mosses, fungi, and algae."

Crispin offered another two words: formicate and fornicate.

Fornicate is of course to have sex with a prostitute. (Or if you're in to architecture, "arched or vaulted in form."

Formicate, is to 1. to crawl around like ants or 2. to swarm with ants or other crawling things

Now, I'd like to see someone use that word in a sentence!

So this has brought the twinkling of a new "word search" to my mind... what words are there that, if you leave one letter out, or change one letter, mean something totally different. So I'm starting a collection of those words.

Punsters in Entertainment Media

British authors are rather famous for their puns and play-on-words - Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams come to mind.

Currently, on the digital radio station BBC Radio 7, you can listen to a show called Another Case of Milton Jones, in which most of the dialog does come in the form of puns.

This entertainment is not for everyone. It's British, and a lot of the jokes and references might not make any sense if you're not familiar with the British and the British sense of humor, as well as British landmarks, attitude toward the French, etc.

I confess I didn't like the show as much as I thought I would, but some of the puns were clever.

(The Bolivian president is getting kind of stroppy (angry) so Milton Jones opens a door and pushes him into a vast section of wet cement. "I hope I haven't set a precedent" he says. Concrete "sets" when it dries.)

There's a new episode once a week, on Wednesday, and the preceding episode is available to listen to for the entire week.

Check it out at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076tqb

(You'll need to visit it via your computer, as you can't hear the audio on a Kindle. Just click on the red "Listen now" text - it doesn't matter what time of day you try to listen to it, it's always there!)

Word Game Wednesday

Visit the web to play Alphabet Soup, which is a game of Acrophobia: http://www.botosaurus.com/games/?q=node/6

From Wikipedia:
Acrophobia is an online multiplayer word game. The game was originally conceived by Anthony Shubert and programmed by Kenrick Mock and Michelle Hoyle in 1995. Originally available over Internet Relay Chat, the game has since been developed into a number of variants: as a download, playable through a browser, via Twitter or through Facebook.

Background
Created by Anthony Shubert in the mid to late 1990s, Acrophobia has similarities to the board game "Acronymble," which came on the market in 1991 and is produced by Acronymwits Inc.

Game play
Players enter a channel hosted by a bot which runs the game. In each round, the bot generates a random acronym. Players compete by racing to create the most coherent or humorous sentence that fits the acronym - in essence, a backronym. After a set amount of time expires, each player then votes anonymously via the bot for their favorite answer (aside from their own).

Points are awarded to the most popular backronym. Bonus points may be also be given based on the fastest response and for voting for the winning option. Some implementations give the speed bonus to the player with the first answer that received at least one vote; this is to discourage players from quickly entering gibberish just to be the first. Bonus points for voting for the winner helps discourage players from intentionally voting for poor answers to avoid giving votes to answers that might beat their own.

Some versions of the game were criticised for the ease with which players could disrupt games with obscenities, and the anonymous nature of the site meant that there were no repercussions for this behaviour. Usually, nonsense backronyms will score low and the most humorous sounding backronym which effectively makes a sentence from the initials will win. Some rounds may have a specific topic that the answers should fit, although enforcement of the topic depends on solely on the other players' willingness to vote for off-topic answers.

Acrophobia was commended as an online game that showed the potential for educational use, and that its use of technology allowed "imaginative play, instant feedback, and [an] unusual scoring system

Palindrome Monday: Single words

What's a palindrome? A word, phrase, number or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction (the adjustment of punctuation and spaces between words is generally permitted). Composing literature in palindromes is an example of "constrained writing". The word "palindrome" was coined from the Greek root palin ("again") and dromos ("way, direction") by English writer Ben Jonson in the 17th century.

Palindromes date back at least to 79 AD, as the palindromic Latin word square "Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas" (The farmer/sower, Arepo, sows the seeds) was found as a graffito at Herculaneum, buried by ash in that year. This palindrome is remarkable for the fact that it also reproduces itself if one forms a word from the first letters, then the second letters and so forth. Hence, it can be arranged into a word square that reads in four different ways: horizontally or vertically from either top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left.

Palindromic words:
civic, radar, level, rotor, kayak, reviver, racecar, redder

________
New posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with an occasional post on other days when the spirit moves me.

What are tenterhooks?

Was driving my Aunt around yesterday when she said something like, "This kind of driving has me on tender hooks." I didn't correct her, of course, but the phrase of course is "Has me on tenterhooks."

And then I got to thinking. What are tenterhooks?

Here's the definition from wikipedia:
Tenterhooks were used as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth was woven it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt. A fuller (also called a tucker or walker) cleaned the woollen cloth in a fulling mill, and then had to dry it carefully or the wool would shrink. To prevent this shrinkage, the fuller would place the wet cloth on a large wooden frame, a "tenter", and leave it to dry outside. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from the Latin "tendere", to stretch) using hooks (nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth's edges (selvedges) were fixed so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size. At one time it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see tenter-fields full of these frames.

By the mid-eighteenth century the phrase "on tenterhooks" came into use to mean being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter.

Cowboys overcome tryptophan for moral victory

It's not often that a sports website uses a word that I've never heard before, but CBS Sportsline's article on the Cowboy's defeat today (in football, vs the New Orleans Saint) did it.

What is a tryptofan?

I'm assuming that trypt = 3 (as in tryptych), so perhaps he's talking about the 3 major errors the Cowboys made that ended up in them losing the game, although really, if Roy Williams hadn't fumbled the ball as he was going into the end zone they would have won...

But, here's the official definition:
Tryptophan is one of the 10 essential amino acids that the body uses to synthesize the proteins it needs. It's well-known for its role in the production of nervous system messengers, especially those related to relaxation, restfulness, and sleep.

Not quite the right one! Let's investigate further!

Well...according to Dictionary.com... there is no other definition for this word...

So presumably the author is saying that the Cowboys ate turkey, which made them tired, but they overcame it for a moral victory.

(Apparently there is an "old wive's tale" that eating turkey will make you sleepy.)

What is Gonzo Journalism?

The "Gonzo fist," characterized by two thumbs and four fingers, was originally used in Hunter S. Thompson's 1970 campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado. It has become a symbol of Thompson and Gonzo journalism as a whole.

I was reading the biography of an author on the web, and it said he was a journalist, "mostly of the gonzo variety."

I'd never heard that before, so of course I looked it up.

According to Wikipedia:
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written subjectively, often including the reporter as part of the story via a first-person narrative. The word Gonzo was first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. The term has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.

Gonzo journalism tends to favor style over accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered. It disregards the 'polished' edited product favored by newspaper media and strives for a more gritty approach. Use of quotations, sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity is common.

Hunter S. Thompson
Thompson based his style on William Faulkner's idea that "fiction is often the best fact." While the things that Thompson wrote about are basically true, he used satirical devices to drive his points home. He often wrote about recreational drugs and alcohol use which added additional subjective flair to his reporting. The term "Gonzo" has also come into (sometimes pejorative) use to describe journalism that is in the vein of Thompson's style, characterized by a drug-fueled stream of consciousness writing technique.

________
Vocabulary: gonzo journalism

Crossword clue: Hunter S. Thompson. (Author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, inventor of Gonzo Journalism)

Manifesto

Words and their meanings, and tips on how to solve them.