I insist that I have not come up with all the worthwhile permutations of this combination of letters, yet I must also admit that I am less pleased with this latest variation.
Previous menu sign adventures:
Showing posts with label anagrams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anagrams. Show all posts
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Banal Lay, Bent Dent
The anagrams continue.
I insist that I have not come up with all the worthwhile permutations of this combination of letters, yet I must also admit that I am less pleased with this latest variation.
Previous menu sign adventures:
I insist that I have not come up with all the worthwhile permutations of this combination of letters, yet I must also admit that I am less pleased with this latest variation.
Previous menu sign adventures:
Thursday, March 19, 2009
A Lenten Tabby Land
Long overdue: an update to the menu sign anagram game. The last was back in September, and in the remaining time the menu sign read as this:
A bit of a downer of a sign, I’ll admit. Apparently it made sense at the time. As of today, however, the sign bears a more seasonally appropriate message:
Plus cats and stuff.
Previous menu sign adventures:
A bit of a downer of a sign, I’ll admit. Apparently it made sense at the time. As of today, however, the sign bears a more seasonally appropriate message:
Plus cats and stuff.
Previous menu sign adventures:
Monday, February 23, 2009
The H-Bus
Two days after blogiversary festivities and one day after the required post-festivities period of recuperation, I’m back on track, making up for the word of the week I neglected to do this weekend. It’s more than a doozy. A doozleplex? A doozydoozy? A doobleoozy?
Quite a mouthful, especially when honorableness would do the trick, as Word Web points out. This verbal oddity gets mentioned fairly often in word nerd circles, for all the right reasons.
First off, it is considered by some to be the longest word coined by Shakespeare, though dissenters might point out that he simply borrowed it from Medieval Latin. It’s the word honorificabilitudinitas, in the plural ablative form. (The ablative case is used in Latin more or less in specific prepositional constructions. Of all the languages one might learn in a typical American high school, I’m pretty sure Latin is the only one that uses the ablative, at least by that name.)
It’s also the longest word Shakespeare ever used, counting the ones other people made up. Though it’s used in Love’s Labour’s Lost and I have read this play, I have no recollection of it. It’s spoken by Costard in the first scene of the fifth act. “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. / I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; / for thou art not so long by the head as / honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.” As if I needed to cram more worthless information into this post, I’m going to explain that last reference. A flap-dragon — which is apparently interchangeable with snap-dragon — apparently can be several things, though it seems most likely that Costard means the first one in the below list:
Despite this fact, it does not use the letter “e,” the most common vowel. The next-longest word to omit this letter is the equally phenomenal floccinaucinihilipilification — “the act of habit of describing or regarding something as useless,” which just happens to be what most people do to honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Wikipedia points out that by virtue of being used only once in Shakespeare’s collective works, honorificabilitudinitatibus is also a hapax legomenon, a fun title to give to words that only appear once in the written record of a language or a single text. For example, until the posting of this entry, floccinaucinihilipilification was a hapax legomenon on Back of the Cereal box. But it ain’t no more.
James Joyce also used honorificabilitudinitatibus, as World Wide Words points out, but no one apparently cares about this as much as Shakespeare’s use of it. I’m guessing Joyce used it more than once, thus preventing it from being a hapax legomenon but possibly also indicating that Joyce was the better writer since he found more than one apt occasion to use it.
Finally, and perhaps most spectacularly, the word is notable because Baconophiles — that is, those who love Francis Bacon — take its presence in Love’s Labor’s Lost as evidence that Bacon himself wrote the play and all of the other Shakespeare plays as well. Apparently this is a thing that people like to think. The word happens to be an anagram for the Latin phrase hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, meaning “these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world.” This website takes it a bit further and gets into numerological theories that tie the word with creepy Rosicrucian stuff. More germane to the discussion of the play’s authorship, the appearance of honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love’s Labor’s Lost is followed by another strange line. Armado’s page Moth asks, “…what is a / B, spelt backward, with the horn on his head?” The conspiracy theorists allege that Moth’s question is a coded reference to Bacon — “Bacorn,” with the first two letters being those “spelt backward” and the corn meaning “horn” in the sense of unicorns and tricorn hats. Very strange, but suitably so, given the subject at hand.
Previous words of the week:
honorificabilitudinitatibus (hah-no-rif-i-ka-bil-i-too-dee-nee-ta-bus) — noun: the state of quality of being able to achieve honors.(And I am only guessing on the pronunciation. Most articles on the word focus more on its strange history than on how to say it, I’m guessing because you probably wouldn’t ever speak this work, even if you wanted to. As for which syllables would be accented, I can only guess.)
Quite a mouthful, especially when honorableness would do the trick, as Word Web points out. This verbal oddity gets mentioned fairly often in word nerd circles, for all the right reasons.
First off, it is considered by some to be the longest word coined by Shakespeare, though dissenters might point out that he simply borrowed it from Medieval Latin. It’s the word honorificabilitudinitas, in the plural ablative form. (The ablative case is used in Latin more or less in specific prepositional constructions. Of all the languages one might learn in a typical American high school, I’m pretty sure Latin is the only one that uses the ablative, at least by that name.)
It’s also the longest word Shakespeare ever used, counting the ones other people made up. Though it’s used in Love’s Labour’s Lost and I have read this play, I have no recollection of it. It’s spoken by Costard in the first scene of the fifth act. “O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. / I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; / for thou art not so long by the head as / honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.” As if I needed to cram more worthless information into this post, I’m going to explain that last reference. A flap-dragon — which is apparently interchangeable with snap-dragon — apparently can be several things, though it seems most likely that Costard means the first one in the below list:
- A worthless or trivial thing.
- A Dutchman or a German, though to speak of such people in this way would not endear you to them. (It’s something to keep in mind if you travel back in time to seventeenth-century Europe.)
- A fiendish sounding game that apparently bored people played on Christmas Eve in which they would attempt to snatch raisins out from a bowl of flaming brandy. (This could have been the game of kings back in the day, but I can’t help thinking that those who played flap-dragon then would be the ones smoking meth today.)
- The bowl itself.
- The raisins themselves.
- Or whatever other fruit you decide to play the game with.
- The one thing that Costard’s remark isn’t referring to, apparently, is the one thing I knew as a snapdragon prior to writing this post: those flowers that look like a dragon’s head and move when you squeeze them. The name for the genus is antirrhinum. The flower is oddly mentioned nowhere on the page for flap-dragon, despite that the flower is the one children should be encouraged to play with.
Despite this fact, it does not use the letter “e,” the most common vowel. The next-longest word to omit this letter is the equally phenomenal floccinaucinihilipilification — “the act of habit of describing or regarding something as useless,” which just happens to be what most people do to honorificabilitudinitatibus.
Wikipedia points out that by virtue of being used only once in Shakespeare’s collective works, honorificabilitudinitatibus is also a hapax legomenon, a fun title to give to words that only appear once in the written record of a language or a single text. For example, until the posting of this entry, floccinaucinihilipilification was a hapax legomenon on Back of the Cereal box. But it ain’t no more.
James Joyce also used honorificabilitudinitatibus, as World Wide Words points out, but no one apparently cares about this as much as Shakespeare’s use of it. I’m guessing Joyce used it more than once, thus preventing it from being a hapax legomenon but possibly also indicating that Joyce was the better writer since he found more than one apt occasion to use it.
Finally, and perhaps most spectacularly, the word is notable because Baconophiles — that is, those who love Francis Bacon — take its presence in Love’s Labor’s Lost as evidence that Bacon himself wrote the play and all of the other Shakespeare plays as well. Apparently this is a thing that people like to think. The word happens to be an anagram for the Latin phrase hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, meaning “these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world.” This website takes it a bit further and gets into numerological theories that tie the word with creepy Rosicrucian stuff. More germane to the discussion of the play’s authorship, the appearance of honorificabilitudinitatibus in Love’s Labor’s Lost is followed by another strange line. Armado’s page Moth asks, “…what is a / B, spelt backward, with the horn on his head?” The conspiracy theorists allege that Moth’s question is a coded reference to Bacon — “Bacorn,” with the first two letters being those “spelt backward” and the corn meaning “horn” in the sense of unicorns and tricorn hats. Very strange, but suitably so, given the subject at hand.
Previous words of the week:
- adulterine, ambeer
- barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
- catholicon, cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
- deasil, decussate
- epeolatry, espalier
- fabiform, fissilingual
- gallinipper, grandgore
- itaiitai
- jehu
- kaffir, kakopygian
- lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
- malacia, mongo
- nobiliary particle
- ooglification, ordured, orf
- pareidolia, pismire, pong
- quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh
- roynish
- scrutator, shebang
- tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby
- ucalegon
- veneficial
- witzelsucht
- xenodocheionology
- ypsiliform
- zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic
Friday, September 19, 2008
Tableland by Annet
Menu sign mischief:
Not that I have any idea what it means. I suppose it could be an interior decorating service based out of somewhere up on the mesa. That person’s name is Annette, but she dropped the duplicate letters in an effort to sound more hip and stylish.
A better one next time. Promise.
Previous menu sign adventures:
Not that I have any idea what it means. I suppose it could be an interior decorating service based out of somewhere up on the mesa. That person’s name is Annette, but she dropped the duplicate letters in an effort to sound more hip and stylish.
A better one next time. Promise.
Previous menu sign adventures:
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Bandana Belly Tent
The menu sign has been changed — and this time by hands other than mine.
I'm thinking it sounds like a hippie-leaning line of pregnant active wear. Thoughts?
Previous menu sign adventures:
I'm thinking it sounds like a hippie-leaning line of pregnant active wear. Thoughts?
Previous menu sign adventures:
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Antenna, by Tall Deb
A bit more abstract this time.
My interpretation: Antenna is an album by Swedish space rock quartet Tall Deb. Everyone thought the band's lead singer was, in fact, Tall Deb, mostly because the six-foot-four Scandinavian beauty towers over her male bandmates. However, her name is and always has been Jamilla, and the name "Tall Deb" references a minor villainous character in the 1974 cult classic Dune Buggy Massacre at Red Sands High. Antenna, the newest sonic venture by Tall Deb, features songs inspired by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project.
Previous menu sign rearrangements:
My interpretation: Antenna is an album by Swedish space rock quartet Tall Deb. Everyone thought the band's lead singer was, in fact, Tall Deb, mostly because the six-foot-four Scandinavian beauty towers over her male bandmates. However, her name is and always has been Jamilla, and the name "Tall Deb" references a minor villainous character in the 1974 cult classic Dune Buggy Massacre at Red Sands High. Antenna, the newest sonic venture by Tall Deb, features songs inspired by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project.
Previous menu sign rearrangements:
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Bentley Banana, Ltd.
It is happening again.
See, it already happened before. I'd like to think this incarnation refers to a company that imports, like, the most fancypants bananas ever.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Le Bad Nanny Battle
For unknown reasons, our office has one of those movable letter signs that restaurants use to announce the day's special or tell you to seat yourself. Only our sign has only the letters you see in the below photo.
The arrangement is mine, and it's the first I can recall doing that used all the letters. The sign and its enigmatic, anagramatic messages amuse me and I think I may start documenting them.
The arrangement is mine, and it's the first I can recall doing that used all the letters. The sign and its enigmatic, anagramatic messages amuse me and I think I may start documenting them.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
The Snake in the Mailbox
Charlie Pace — never my favorite. Among the plentiful Losers, as I like to call the cast of Lost, Charlie was an “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” type who, following derring-do in the pilot, slunk into the background. Following the resolution of his heroin addiction plotline, Charlie seemed to just spin around Claire, forming the closest to a nuclear family that the show had to offer. Thus, his death didn’t come to a surprise, in my opinion, since anyone familiar to the show should know the writers so often depicted family interactions as being rather toxic and fragmented.
Following last night’s season finale of Lost, I have to say that I feel a sense of relief, rather than — ahem — loss. Charlie’s much-foreshadowed death struck me as tragic but fitting, even heroic in his last-minute scrawling of “NOT PENNY’S BOAT” on his hand in an effort to warn Desmond that Naomi — a.k.a. the girl who fell from the sky — may not be the savior the Losers had hoped for.
Furthermore, the show didn’t end this season on as much a jaw-dropping cliffhanger as the previous two seasons did. That’s a plus, in my book. Sure, the faithful must now agonize until February over the notion that the Losers do, in fact, escape Four Toe Island at some point. Based on Jack’s appearance in his “flash forward” — as opposed to the flashbacks that mark every single preceding episode — not everyone who escapes is better off for doing so. How can this be? I have no clue, nor do I expect to for the next year or so. But I can just happily ponder that. It won’t occupy the amount of mental energy the week-to-week chain of surprises and mysteries did.
I have to ask again, however, if the Lost writers had a grudge against certain groups: namely Mancunians and black people. In one episode, Lost dispatched its two characters who hail from Manchester — Naomi and Charlie — just one episode after the pair bonded over their shared hometown. Granted, Naomi isn’t necessarily dead one the ground, but a knife to the back doesn’t bode well. Even less so for the blood pouring from her mouth.
Naomi — who looks like she could be Hispanic or Indian or any number of races but whose last name “Dorrit” leads me to believe she’s black, much as Marsha Thomason, the actress who plays her is — marks the most recent in a long list of dearly departed black characters. First, Michael, shortly after he shot two characters to death, left the island with Walt, then Eko was smashed to death and Miss Klugh took a bullet in the chest. The sole black character with a speaking role is now Rose and God help the writers of Lost if they knock her off too.
By the way, Lost fans posting online have posited that Naomi Dorrit’s name is an anagram for two phrases that are descriptions of her as a person: “maid in rotor,” which perhaps refers to her introduction to the show as having leapt from a helicopter, and “raid monitor,” which could confirm that Charlie and Ben’s allegations that she has a far more sinister job than as Penelope’s scout wanting to help the whole cast home.
Following last night’s season finale of Lost, I have to say that I feel a sense of relief, rather than — ahem — loss. Charlie’s much-foreshadowed death struck me as tragic but fitting, even heroic in his last-minute scrawling of “NOT PENNY’S BOAT” on his hand in an effort to warn Desmond that Naomi — a.k.a. the girl who fell from the sky — may not be the savior the Losers had hoped for.
Furthermore, the show didn’t end this season on as much a jaw-dropping cliffhanger as the previous two seasons did. That’s a plus, in my book. Sure, the faithful must now agonize until February over the notion that the Losers do, in fact, escape Four Toe Island at some point. Based on Jack’s appearance in his “flash forward” — as opposed to the flashbacks that mark every single preceding episode — not everyone who escapes is better off for doing so. How can this be? I have no clue, nor do I expect to for the next year or so. But I can just happily ponder that. It won’t occupy the amount of mental energy the week-to-week chain of surprises and mysteries did.
I have to ask again, however, if the Lost writers had a grudge against certain groups: namely Mancunians and black people. In one episode, Lost dispatched its two characters who hail from Manchester — Naomi and Charlie — just one episode after the pair bonded over their shared hometown. Granted, Naomi isn’t necessarily dead one the ground, but a knife to the back doesn’t bode well. Even less so for the blood pouring from her mouth.
Naomi — who looks like she could be Hispanic or Indian or any number of races but whose last name “Dorrit” leads me to believe she’s black, much as Marsha Thomason, the actress who plays her is — marks the most recent in a long list of dearly departed black characters. First, Michael, shortly after he shot two characters to death, left the island with Walt, then Eko was smashed to death and Miss Klugh took a bullet in the chest. The sole black character with a speaking role is now Rose and God help the writers of Lost if they knock her off too.
By the way, Lost fans posting online have posited that Naomi Dorrit’s name is an anagram for two phrases that are descriptions of her as a person: “maid in rotor,” which perhaps refers to her introduction to the show as having leapt from a helicopter, and “raid monitor,” which could confirm that Charlie and Ben’s allegations that she has a far more sinister job than as Penelope’s scout wanting to help the whole cast home.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Mr. Whackier Damage
More of the same, I'm afraid. So in one column, we've got the following:
[ source: Prance Closer ]
- I am wrecked.
- wreck media
- Me wear dick
- We cream, kid.
- wrecked Ami
- Ewe dick ram
- Mr. Weak, iced
- We rim a deck.
- Wee dick ram.
- Magic wreaked harm.
- A grim, charmed wake.
- Mr. Whackier Damage
- I'm a charmed gawker.
- "Ah! Merge a warm dick!"
- Had warm meek cigar.
- I'm a marked crew hag.
- Ham, warm dick agree.
[ source: Prance Closer ]
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