Posts Tagged ‘words’

Aren't words a fun blessing?! Long time readers of my blog know that I love words and word play. One kind of word play that I have not done much with is the anagram — a word or phrase that is made by transposing or rearranging the letters of another word or phrase. The closest I've come to doing anything with anagrams is playing Boggle and Text Twist.

Students in my French lit courses always seem to be surprised to learn that several great names in French literature wrote under pseudonyms that were actually anagrams of their real names. In the sixteenth century Rabelais published his first book under the pseudonym of Alcofribas Nasier — an anagram of François Rabelais, minus the cedilla. The eighteenth-century author François-Marie Arouet wrote under a pseudonym. The Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, plus the initial letters of the sobriquet "le jeune" ("the younger," like our "junior," but spelled ieune back then instead of jeune) was rendered "AROVET LI." The anagram of that is the better-known name Voltaire.

Today's blog post is a some anagrams that I have accumulated through the years. Someone out there has way too much time on his hands. Remind me never to play Boggle or Scrabble with the person who came up with these!

The Original → The Anagram

dormitory → dirty room

the Morse code → here come dots
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On my blog I poke fun at all sorts of things, good-naturedly, of course. It's especially fun when it's something that I know I am also guilty of. The other day I said something in class and immediately realized that what I had said was redundant. I pointed out to my students what I had said. I figured it was at least marginally on topic — I teach French and linguistic redundancies are undoubtedly possible in every language.

Here's a dictionary definition of the word:

re·dun·dan·cy (noun), 1. The state of being redundant. 2. A superfluity; an excess. 3. Unnecessary repetition.

Here's a fun visualization of redundancy that I found online:

Newscasters and politicians, possibly because of the sheer amount of speaking they do, seem to offer up quite a few redundancies. The other day in connection with Swine Flu (H1N1) I heard one person call it a "world-wide pandemic disease." But they don't have a monopoly on redundancy. Yesterday I heard someone talking about "two twins." And for some reason, all of my high school social studies teachers used to say "irregardless."

Some redundancies might not even strike people as being redundant, until further reflection, like "government deficits." Some redundancies result from adding a superfluous modifier to a word that is already an absolute, like "quite unique" or "very true." Though we say these things innocently, they are still redundancies that we repetitiously repeat again and again over and over. You get the point, which is why say it twice?

I had an extremely long list of redundancies in my files and found some even longer lists online. Rather than repeating those lists, here are some of my personal favorites:
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We live in a world of words. Words have such power, both to build up or to tear down. Anyone who has been one of my readers for any length of time knows that I am a word person. I love words! Many events in recent days have reminded me of words. First of all was our recent visit with our daughter Megan, son-in-law Jim, and grandson Drew in Michigan. (A few more details at the end of this post....) Since we last saw our grandson three months ago, his vocabulary has absolutely exploded! We can hardly believe all the words he uses now.

This past Sunday we visited a church out of state where the message of the morning was from Psalm 19:14 "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer." It was an excellent message on the power of words to encourage, to speak for the Lord and to the Lord, and even to share humor with others! (Imagine my delight!) One theme in the message was that "out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." (Matthew 12:34) Those words that come out of our mouths are merely an indication of what is in our hearts. That principle is repeated often in the Bible.

Words have also been a topic in the political scene this week in one way or another. The other day TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States) — the machine that feeds words to POTUS (President of the United States) when he speaks in almost any public setting — broke, leaving him literally at a loss for words! A Google search for TOTUS just brought up over two million results, and much has been said about the many inaccurate things Mr. Obama has said (even personal facts about himself and his family), simply because he was reading the words on his teleprompter. I will not go into all of that in this post, other than to mention the preceding in connection to words.

One major event this week is the Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor. Not only are the hearings the usual war of words, but Ms. Sotomayor is finding out personally that the words we speak have a way of coming back to haunt us. One quotation of hers that has received much attention this week and in the weeks leading up to the hearings is "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." I've been trying to imagine what would be happening to a white male if he had said "I would hope that a wise white male with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life." She's fortunate, though, to belong to one of the groups of people incapable of racism. The trouble is that her statement was not a one-time "misspeak" (whatever a misspeak is!). It was given in basically the same format several different times over several years. (Out of the abundance of the heart,...)

Another statement of hers that is getting attention is that "the court of appeals is where policy is made." (I thought the Constitution assigns that duty to the legislative branch and that it is the duty of the judicial branch to interpret the law. Silly me!?) You can view her saying that at this link on YouTube. For those of you who cannot get to YouTube, I'm posting the clip below. Those of you reading this post in a blog reader may have to go to my blog post to view the clip.

It's been interesting to hear her and others try to explain away her words in order to convince the Senate that she is not a judicial activist with a racist agenda.

I relate those things about Ms. Sotomayor, not to grind a political axe, but to point out that words have consequences, or at least they do for most of us. She has said what she has said, and no one is putting words into her mouth. (Remember, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.)

As a teacher and as a blogger, I speak and write a lot of words. It is a sobering to ponder the responsibility that is mine for the impact of my words on my students and on my readers. Once your words have left your mouth or your computer, you cannot recall them. And try as you may, you can never completely change their impact. A verse that often comes to my mind in connection to this is Proverbs 10:19 "When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent." It's important to weigh our words and to leave some of them unsaid or unwritten rather than to offend.

That said, on to this week's iv — several jokes about how and how much some people use words.

A man was giving a speech at a meeting. He got a bit carried away and talked for three hours.

Finally, he realized what he was doing and said, "I'm sorry I talked so long. I left my watch at home."

A voice from the back of the room shouted, "There's a calendar behind you!"

A husband, trying to prove to his wife that women talk more than men, showed her a study which indicated that men use on the average only 15,000 words a day, whereas women use 30,000 words a day.

She thought about this for a while and then told her husband, "Women use twice as many words as men because they have to repeat everything they say." To which he replied, "What?"

In a monastery a new monk took a vow of silence. He agreed to abide by the tradition in this particular monastery of saying only two words every ten years.

After the first ten years had gone by, the monk was summoned into the abbot's office. The abbot nodded, and the monk said, "Food bad," turned, and went back to his room.

After twenty years, the scene was repeated, except this time the monk said, "Bed hard," turned, and went back to his room.

At the thirty year mark, the monk frowned and said to the abbot, "I quit."

The abbot looked at him and said, "Well, it's about time. You've been here for thirty years and have done nothing but complain!"

Once upon a time, there was a prince who for some reason was under a curse. The curse was that the prince could speak only one word each year. However, he could save up the words so that if he did not speak at the end of a year, the following year he was allowed to speak two words. (This was apparently before the time of letter writing or sign language.) One day, he met a beautiful princess - ruby lips, golden hair, sapphire eyes - and fell madly in love with her. With the greatest difficulty, he refrained from speaking for 2 whole years so that he could look at her and say, "My darling." But at the end of these 2 years, he wished to tell her that he loved her rather than waste the opportunity on just those 2 words. So he went 3 more years without speaking, bringing the total number of silent years to 5.

At the end of these 5 years, he realized that he also wanted to ask her to marry him. So he went another 4 years without speaking. Finally, as the 9th year of silence ended, his joy knew no bounds. Leading the lovely princess to the most secluded and romantic place in the beautiful royal garden, the prince heaped a hundred red roses on her lap, knelt before her, and taking her hand in his, said, "My darling, I love you! Will you marry me?" And the princess tucked a strand of golden hair behind her dainty ear, opened her sapphire eyes in wonder, parted her ruby lips, and said, "Pardon?"

This coming Sunday morning I am scheduled to be interviewed on one of our local TV stations WYFF in a segment called Sound Off South! I've been told that the interview will be on the Sound Off South! site later that day. You locals can watch it live between 7:00 and 8:00 this Sunday morning on channel 4. The rest of you can catch it on the site.

We recently took a long road trip to see family in Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri. While spending this past week at Meg and Jim's house, an activity I enjoyed with my grandson Drew was to stroll down the street several mornings to Tim Horton's for coffee and "Timbits," their version of donut holes. Here's a picture from my cell phone of Drew enjoying a Timbit.

This post already has so many words that I'll stop for now. My wife will be sharing various aspects of our trip on her blog and has just posted about the first leg of our trip.

I look forward to your comments on what I've said about words.

quotation...

"The ultimate choice you must make concerning sin is that either your sin must go or God must go." - Dr. Drew Conley

=^..^= =^..^=
Rob

Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.

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Have you ever heard of spoonerisms? Or better yet, have you ever uttered a spoonerism inadvertently? A former French student of mine and a long-time ivman reader who knows my love for punning let me know that the Word of the Day this past Monday, March 23, on dictionary.com was "spoonerism." I told him his e-mail had moved one of my posts that had been simmering on a back burner to the front burner. Read on to learn more about spoonerisms....

By definition a spoonerism is a word that describes the unintentional transposition of two sounds within a word or phrase. This transposition usually involves (a) the sounds created by the initial letters of words within a phrase; (b) whole words; or (c) the initial sounds of syllables within one word.

Examples:

"I just saw a monarch butterfly!"
"I just saw a monarch flutter by!"

"Vulcans do not shoot from the hip, Captain."
"Vulcans do not hoot from the ship, Captain."

The term "spoonerism" was coined around 1900, after the Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930). He was a distinguished British cleric and scholar who served as Dean and Warden of Oxford's New College for a period of some 40 years but is best known for the many humorous misstatements attributed to him. According to the New College website at Oxford University, Spooner "almost certainly never uttered a 'spoonerism,' but equally certainly had a number of curious verbal traits." In any case, many have insisted that he indeed uttered most of the spoonerisms attributed to him.

Spoonerisms are linguistic flip-flops that turn "a well-oiled bicycle" into "a well-boiled icicle" and other ludicrous ways speakers of English get their "mix all talked up." It is said that Spooner once addressed a group of farmers as "ye noble tons of soil," queried after a university official by asking "Is the bean dizzy?" and admonished a student because he had "tasted two worms" and "hissed all my mystery lectures."

English is a fertile soil for spoonerisms, as author and lecturer Richard Lederer points out, because our language has more than three times as many words as any other – over 618,000 and growing at 450 a year. Consequently, there's a greater chance that any accidental transposition of letters or syllables will produce rhyming substitutes that still make sense – well, sort of.... A word of caution – I do not advise one's attempting to develop a habit of doing spoonerisms since some can be quite embarrassing or even vulgar.

Some of the best known "tips of the slung" attributed to the Rev. Spooner...

fighting a liar – lighting a fire
cattle ships and bruisers – battle ships and cruisers
nosey little cook – cosy little nook
a blushing crow – a crushing blow
our queer old Dean – our dear old Queen
we'll have the hags flung out – we'll have the flags hung out
our shoving leopard – our loving shepherd
a half–warmed fish – a half–formed wish

Some spoonerisms others have made...

know your blows – blow your nose
go and shake a tower – go and take a shower
nicking your pose – picking your nose
a lack of pies – a pack of lies
sealing the hick – healing the sick
pit nicking – nit picking
wave the sails – save the whales
chipping the flannel on TV – flipping the channel on TV
I'm shout of the hour – I'm out of the shower
lead of spite – speed of light
I hit my bunny phone – I hit my funny bone
bedding wells – wedding bells
I must mend the sail – I must send the mail
It crawls through the fax – It falls through the cracks
Would you like a nasal hut? – Would you like a hazel nut?

Here's a story where the final barb of the pun-chline is a spoonerism:

Once there was a horse that was in agony. Several birds were building nests in his mane and nothing he did would make them stop. The noise and activity were driving the horse crazy. So, he decided to see the wise old owl for help. The old owl told him to go home and put some yeast in his mane and all would be well.

The horse thought this was a bit nutty, but out of desperation, he did what the owl told him.

The next morning the mane was completely clear of nests. The very surprised horse trotted excitedly to the owl's house.

When asked why the yeast worked, the owl replied, "Horse, don't you know that yeast is yeast and nest is nest and never the mane shall tweet?"

quotation...

"When you pull out the gospel thread, a believer's life unravels." - Dr. Drew Conley

=^..^= =^..^=
Rob

"Noah's stock was floating high while everyone else in the world was in liquidation." - Les Ollila

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Paul Harvey (...pause...) Good day! was his signature line at the end of virtually every broadcast. This past weekend saw the the passing of that American icon, Paul Harvey Aurandt (September 4, 1918 – February 28, 2009) The picture on the right was taken when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the nation's highest civilian honor.

I enjoyed listening to Paul Harvey through the years. Long before Internet news sources, before today's talk radio format, and before the choices now available on cable TV for honest, thorough news coverage, Paul Harvey was unique in serving up insightful news that no one else was reporting, as well as off-beat or heart-warming stories about people, both famous and obscure. He will be remembered by many for his The Rest of the Story segments. Here's a neat one called "Gentle Legacy." (If you're reading this by e-mail or in a blog reader, you will probably have to go to the blog to view this video clip.)

He will also be remembered for his distinctive, resonant voice and for what has been been described as his "pregnant pauses." Danny Thomas once told Mr. Harvey, "You'd better be right, because you sound like God." (It's a unique voice, but I don't know if I'd go that far....) On another occasion Danny Thomas commented, "You can almost hear the amber waves of grain." Obviously, Mr. Thomas was a loyal Paul Harvey fan.

In my files I had a piece attributed to him that I especially like. I was able to determine at truthorfiction.com that he indeed wrote this piece.

If I Were the Devil
by Paul Harvey
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com

If I were the devil...

I would gain control of the most powerful nation in the world;

I would delude their minds into thinking that they had come from man's effort, instead of God's blessings;

I would promote an attitude of loving things and using people, instead of the other way around;

I would dupe entire states into relying on gambling for their state revenue;

I would convince people that character is not an issue when it comes to leadership;

I would make it legal to take the life of unborn babies;

I would make it socially acceptable to take one's own life, and invent machines to make it convenient;

I would cheapen human life as much as possible so that the life of animals are valued more than human beings;

I would take God out of the schools, where even the mention of His name was grounds for a lawsuit;

I would come up with drugs that sedate the mind and target the young, and I would get sports heroes to advertise them;

I would get control of the media, so that every night I could pollute the mind of every family member for my agenda;

I would attack the family, the backbone of any nation.

I would make divorce acceptable and easy, even fashionable. If the family crumbles, so does the nation;

I would compel people to express their most depraved fantasies on canvas and movie screens, and I would call it art;

I would convince the world that people are born homosexuals, and that their lifestyles should be accepted and marveled;

I would convince the people that right and wrong are determined by a few who call themselves authorities and refer to their agenda as politically correct;

I would persuade people that the church is irrelevant and out of date, and the Bible is for the naive;

I would dull the minds of Christians, and make them believe that prayer is not important, and that faithfulness and obedience are optional;

I guess I would leave things pretty much the way they are.

Bet over at Dappled Things did a post yesterday on Paul Harvey. She found a quotation from him describing his entry into the field of radio at age 14: "As a boy, I fell in love with words and ran away from home and joined the radio."

Harvey is credited with coining or popularizing such terms as "skyjacker," "Reaganomics," and "guesstimate." I find it ironic that this post on Paul Harvey falls so close on the heels of my post on Dr. Seuss who also loved and coined words.

Do you think it would be fair to say that Paul Harvey was also a "word nerd?" Do you have any memories of or reflections on Paul Harvey's career?

quotation...

"If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will." - Paul Harvey

=^..^= =^..^=
Rob

"I've never seen a monument erected to a pessimist." - Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey ... Good day!

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