Wiarton Willie may have seen his shadow on Groundhog Day, thus pointing to a delayed spring, but it's still time for a figurative spring cleaning of the Word Play files.
A century ago puzzles
Having just picked up an 1895 copy of A Century of Charades, I pass along two puzzles. William Bellamy's book contains 100 poems that must be deciphered in the manner of a cryptic-crossword clue. That form of riddle had been popular for centuries, and Bellamy's success with his first "century" was so great that he published several sequels.
Frustratingly, he doesn't supply the answers at the back. He offers a complex numerical code which, if readers think they have solved the riddles, they can use to determine whether their answers are correct. Each solution is a single word. Bellamy breaks the word into syllables, and provides clues to the first syllable, last syllable and any in between. "My charades are all accurate either to the sound or to the spelling, but not necessarily to both," he writes.
I have tried eight, and so far solved only two, which I will print here.
My first is headgear of Ismail;
My last rebukes the lazy sinner;
Hang up my total by the tail,
And when it falls, ask me to dinner.
My first, a sacred river,
Flows to a sunless sea;
My next was doomed forever
To be followed by a bee;
My third I do that you can guess my whole,
Which Cadmus out of Egypt stole.
(Answers appear at the end of the column.)
When is a consonant a vowel?
After I wrote that "cwm," the word for valley, had no vowels in it, several readers wrote to observe that in Welsh, from which "cwm" comes, "w" is a vowel, pronounced "oo." This raises an interesting question. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary italicizes words or phrases "which, although used in English," are "still regarded as essentially foreign." Examples are déménagement ("moving house") and eschaton ("the final event in the divine plan"). Yet "cwm" is not in italics, indicating that it is firmly ensconced in English. Is the "w" therefore a consonant, or must we amend the old guideline to say that English vowels are a, e, i, o, u and sometimes w and y?
An anchor in both languages
Canada's Naval Reserve publishes a thrice-yearly bilingual publication called (in English) Link and (in French) L'Encre. The word play involved is delightful. On the English cover, the "L" in Link is shaped like an anchor, with a ship's wheel separating the "L" from the other letters: ink. The French title, L'Encre, means ink, and sounds the same as l'ancre, which means anchor. I got in touch with the magazine's editor, Lt.(N) François Ferland, who pointed out a couple of other touches. "An anchor is tied to the ship by a chain of links, and the publication can be seen as a link between the members of the Naval Reserve. On the French side, the members could be said to be anchored to the organization and their ship."
Writers tie their hands
A recent column mentioned Christian Bök's book Eunoia, in which entire chapters use only one of the vowels. Another vehicle for restricting the writer's options is the palindrome, the letters of which can be read the same way backward and forward. If the first three letters are "tar," the writer knows the final three must be "rat." (Tardy? Drat!) These are hard enough to compose in long form, but harder still if, like Bök, writers restrict themselves to just one of the vowels. "Drab Asa was a bard," Howard Richler wrote in The Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes. In his book Mad Amadeus Sued a Madam, Allan Miller offered, "Ira fasts, Alan, on a last safari."
Don't skip to these answers
The answers to the opening two puzzles are "pheasant" (fez, ant) and "alphabet" (Alph the sacred river, "a" precedes "bee," bet). I trust it won't take me a century to figure out the other 98.