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t.anagram
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2022-08-26
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A N A G R A M C O U P L E S
For Your Printer
Program by Ed Fournier
Text by Fender Tucker
I remember seeing Dick Cavett on
Johnny Carson one night. Dick claimed
to have the uncanny ability to take a
word and immediately recite the
letters in the word in alphabetical
order. So Johnny said something like
"ADVOCATE" and Dick immediately
responded, "AACDEOTV". It was quite
impressive.
I don't have any uncanny abilities
but I must admit that I can anagram
faster than the average person. It
comes from years of practice. I've
worked the JUMBLE in the daily
newspaper for thirty years now. I
challenge myself by not using a
pencil. All anagramming must be done
in my head.
I wrote WORD BOWL (published on LS
#45, French and English version on LS
#65) many years ago and in the course
of testing and tweaking it I found
that I got very good at descrambling
the 300+ ten-letter English words.
Cryptic crosswords often use anagrams
in their clues and those clues are the
ones I solve first.
But enough horn-tooting. All of
this leads up to a warning that Ed
Fournier has come up with a extra
tough set of anagramming puzzles for
printing out. I'm still working on
them as a matter of fact. If you can
solve these 20 anagrams you are indeed
an expert and you should be the one
who's doing the tooting.
The idea is to take two words, add
them together and scramble the letters
to come up with a new word. The first
section deals with 6-letter anagrams,
the second with 8-letter anagrams, the
third with 10-letter anagrams and the
fourth with 12-letter anagrams. I'm
even having trouble with the 10-letter
anagrams on which I'm supposedly an
expert. Oh well.
Here's a tip that works for me.
The first part of puzzle #3 is
DRONE + MUTES = ----------
I find it much easier to see if the
letters are laid out as in WORD BOWL
or BOWL-A-SCORE, a popular puzzle in
Dell Crossword Magazines.
D
R O
N E M
U T E S
Aha! I just saw it! This was one that
was escaping me in the DRONE + MUTES
format. This may or may not work for
you but I find it a tremendous help.
By the way, anagrams are not as
trivial as they may seem. They have a
long and interesting history and you'd
be surprised at the mystical symbolism
attributed to them. For a terrific
book on anagrams and other word plays,
order PALINDROMES AND ANAGRAMS by
Howard W. Bergerson, Dover Books,
1973. I recently got a copy through B.
Dalton (or Waldenbooks, I can't
remember which). It's only $3.95, a
price you don't see very often these
days, and has more lore about and
examples of anagrams than you ever
thought possible.
FT