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)