Senator's Opera Treat - To A Rope

Word Ways, Sep 2017

I take my hat off to the 'paper-and-pencil practitioner

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Senator's Opera Treat - To A Rope

TED CLARKE Newquay Cornwall England I take my hat off to the 'paper-and-pencil practitioner' Peter Newby for his clever article "Opera's Not Over 'Til Arepo Returns", which 1 naturally assume was produced without the aid of a computer. At first sight I thought he really had beaten computer buffs to the punch. A few weeks ago I tackled this classic problem, using the Wordsworth database of 14,300 five-letter words; 1 gave it up as impossible! I was naturally eager to see why I had failed. It was soon obvious that I had set myself a more difficult problem because I tried to mirror the AREPO original far more closely than Peter's results indicate. The pattern of the original, with numbers allocated to its letters, is as follows: Note that there are eight different letters and, as shown by the right-hand triangle of numbers, that the missing numbers are a mirror reflection of those above the hypotenuse. Although Peter's squares fulfill this mirroring, he departed from the original somewha t; the first and second row words each, when taken separately, contained five different letters, three of which were common to both rows. The attempt to match these Roman patterns with English equivalents was the cause of my downfall. - ROT A S OPE R A TEN E T ARE P 0 SATOR 1 2 345 267 1 378 4 1 5 I hoped, consists e case, wit forwards pruned th the single­ lins and words take The right-h original; i be perfect given up t an Engl ish letters. Bu between the PROVl. This 284-P publi cover which as th ety, "an IS w IS a for a lingui examp ionall perva their as w is w encod Y" or the m to thE cultur. CAR E S AMENE REF E R ENEMA SERAC T RAP S RELAP A L U L A PAL E R SPA R T ioner' Peter 0 Returns". d of a com­ en computer sic problem, rds; I gave It was soon Ilem because than Peter's bers a lloca t­ 10wn by the numbers are ough Peter's iginal some­ separately, common to with English that stage. ~en involved eight letters rle anagrams ~d that they The longest s PROTOPRO­ ther remark­ ':lome senator in life! i article set equivalents ng words of rth to work palindromes. olete words. SESEY E D I L E S I MIS ELI D E YESES I hoped. as I have with ten-squares, to produce a solution which consists entirely of words from a standard dictionary but, in this case, with listed words, or accepted derivations, reading both forwards and backwards. From a total of almost 200 squares, I pruned them to 19; the words in these were all to be found in the Single-volume standard desk dictionaries Oxford Concise, Col­ lins and Chambers. The three examples shown below have all their words taken from Chambers: The right-hand square is very close to an exact mi rroring of the Rormn original; if T could replace A in RELAP and PALER, the mi rroring would be perfect. Peter's exarrple had spurred me on, showing that I had given up too easily. This square shows that it is possible to create an Engli sh version with fi rst and second rows having five dif ferent letters. But more than two thousand words had been added to the database between the two atterrpts. PROVERBS ARE NEVER OUT OF SEASON Th is the title of a scholarly, yet eminently readable, 28ft-page book by the paremiographer Wolfgang Mieder and published by Oxford University Press in 1993 ($25 in hard­ cover). It is a collection of self-contained essays, most of which were originally published elsewhere, on topics such as the definition of a proverb, their current status in soci­ ety, and detailed analyses of a few specific ones such as "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" and "a picture is worth a thousand words". In Mieder's view, a proverb is a short sentence of wisdom which has had some currency for a period of time; proverb identification must thus fuse linguistic analysis and historical research. As the second example above shows, proverbs are still being minted; occas­ ionally the individual createI' can even be identified. The pervasiveness of proverbs in daily life is illustrated by their uses in such media as advertisements and comic strips, as well as by the many ironic modifications (lla picture is worth a thousand words" comes in many alternatives, encoded by the general phrase "an X is worth a thousand Y" or even "one X is worth a thousand pictures"). One of the most chilling chapters details how the Nazis bent proverbs to their own, sinister use in bad-mouthing Jews and their culture. Words can hurt, as much as sticks and stones! (...truncated)


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Ted Clarke. Senator's Opera Treat - To A Rope, Word Ways, 2018, Volume 26, Issue 3,