Word
gamers unite
By Chris Elliott
Linguistics observations on news of the day may only appeal
to the most ravenous of verbivores, but at the risk of boring
my constituency this week, I’d like to point out a few
of them, the first being that the names Oprah Winfrey and
James Frey end with the same four letters. That’s about
as ironic as slamming into a bridge abutment while adjusting
your seat belt.
It is also worth noting that Oprah Winfrey’s name has
as one of its anagrams the phrase, "Why I fear porn."
James Frey’s name in the anagram finder, like the experience
of trying to get through his trite, redundant book, is no
fun at all.
On
that subject, word gamers have shed a collective tear at the
panoply of anagram generators on the Web. There once was a
time when only those willing to slog through the tedium of
dreaming them up could note that as a writer, the letters
in the name William Shakespeare can be rearranged to spell,
"We all make his praise."
Moving right along, am I the only one to notice that the
name Jack Abramoff begins with "Jack" and ends with
"off"? Probably. Still, the irony of a lobbyist
who so deftly stroked the system having that as a feature
of his moniker is as obvious as Kerry’s pandering threat
of an empty filibuster regarding Samuel Alito’s regrettable
but inevitable confirmation as associate justice of the Supreme
Court.
Why regrettable? My spiritual adviser, and likely go-to guy
as my phone-a-friend if I’m ever on "Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire" put it well in a recent letter. "You
don’t want your high school valedictorian on the Supreme
Court," he wrote. "The valedictorian is an ultra-smart,
out-of-touch cube; a bright, hard-working, well-meaning, well-behaved,
country-loving, God-fearing cube. It’s just 10 or 15 spots
too high in the class rankings to be a good justice."
There is a sports draft pick analogy here as well. Who would
you rather have defending your rights, the NBA’s No.
1 draft pick and disappointment, Pervis Ellison or the undrafted
shot-blocking animal of the Detroit Pistons, Ben Wallace?
Plus, with Wallace, you get the Billy Preston afro at no extra
charge. Perhaps basketball metaphors are less compelling to
my New England readership since the Celtics have been absent
a cadre of effective white team members, so we’ll leave
it at that.
This whole thing is a digression from my stated mission of
news-related wordplay, but in discussing Alito, again I’m
drinking from a dry well. It seemed promising at first, as
the words "male slut" and "Lolita" can
be found in his name, but the leftovers from their employ
are pretty much worthless, and unlike horseshoes and hand
grenades, with anagrams, almost is like love in tennis; it
is nothing. The best I found was "a soil amulet,"
the notion of a dirt clod hanging around one’s neck for
good luck resonating some, but not much.
The surprise hit at Sundance
this year seems to be the movie "Wordplay,"
based in part on the career of Will Shortz, crossword puzzle
editor for the New York Times. It also documents the annual
American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, an event in which crossword
puzzlers cross swords, solving eight original puzzles designed
especially for this event. Like most battles of wits, the
victor is determined by speed and accuracy, so if you can
immediately blurt out the three letter word for a multitude
of eggs*, perhaps you might get to Stamford, Conn., for some
cutthroat competition at the end of March.
Word junkies are odd ducks, and they span the demographics
of personality and politics. On the one hand you have knee-jerk
Bush apologists like William Safire, and on the other hand,
borderline commie whack jobs such as myself. Safire makes
a fair fortune at it, while I earn about enough to take care
of my car payment. My hero and mentor in this arena is my
former teacher at St. Paul’s School in Concord, Richard
Lederer, a bona fide genius in this and many other areas,
and a man who though not possessed of the name recognition
of Safire, is both a smarter and far more decent human being.
Speaking of words, I hope everyone is planning to get together
with all of their politically oriented friends to play the
annual drinking game, "Nookyuler," in which participants
watch the State
of the Union address and pound a shot every time our
commander-in-thief butchers the word, "nuclear."
A gentle reminder, call a cab, because you’ll be staggering
before the end of it. I’m working nights these days,
so I’ll have to miss this year’s pack of lies, but
I’ll read up on it. That way I can digest the speech
without quite as much wincing.
*The answer is "ova."
Chris Elliott can be reached at CDElliott009@aol.com