Tag Archives: Wordplay

These anagrams are out of this world!

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Planets are in the news, as Pluto’s dubious planetary status is under the microscope once again.

Recently, a debate over the defining qualities of a planet was held at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and three of the top names in planetary science presented their cases to the attending audience.

Now, although the audience overwhelmingly voted in favor of Pluto’s planethood, that’s not binding. This wasn’t an International Astronomical Union vote or anything like that.

But it did put the solar system back in the news cycle, and that reminded me of a puzzly planetary story.

In the 1600s, Galileo Galilei was doing amazing work with his telescope, redefining our understanding of the solar system and our place in it. He was doing controversial work, but he still wanted to be able to prove he was the primary person behind a given discovery, so he mailed a letter to his colleague, Johannes Kepler.

Galileo sent Kepler this anagram: s m a i s m r m i l m e p o e t a l e u m i b u n e n u g t t a u i r a s

When properly solved, the anagram reads “Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi,” meaning “I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form.” You see, Galileo had glimpsed Saturn and its famous rings, but due to the poor magnification of his telescope, he’d mistaken the rings themselves for two moons orbiting the planet.

This was a tremendous discovery, adding to our knowledge of what was (at the time) the furthest reaches of our solar system.

But Kepler, while trying to untangle the anagram, came to a different solution. Believing that Galileo’s latest discovery involved Mars, not Saturn, Kepler’s solution read “Salue umbistineum geminatum Martia proles,” meaning Mars has two moons. (The ambiguity of Latin V’s and U’s didn’t help matters.)

So, while Kepler was wrong in his solution, he was unintentionally correct about Mars! (Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, wouldn’t be confirmed until 1877.)

Amazingly enough, this wouldn’t be the only time Galileo relied on Kepler and anagrams to prove provenance when it came to his discoveries.

In 1611, Galileo sent another anagram to Kepler: Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur o.y.

Properly unscrambled, the message reads “Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum,” or “The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia.” This one requires a little more explanation. The mother of love was Venus, and Cynthia was the Moon, meaning that Venus, when observed from Earth, has phases just like the moon.

[Click here for a larger version of this image.]

This probably sounds less important than Galileo’s studies of Saturn, but it’s not. This was an earthshaking discovery, because it was observable evidence that Venus had to pass on both sides of the sun, meaning that Venus orbited the sun. This violated the geocentric model of the solar system so strongly espoused by the church!

It was evidence like this that led to Galileo’s battle with the Inquisition.

And, weirdly enough, there might be one more twist to this story.

Some historians believe that Kepler also solved this Galilean anagram incorrectly, and that his solution once again revealed an unintentional discovery about the solar system.

According to the as-yet-unverified story, Kepler’s solution read “Macula rufa in Jove est gyratur mathem…,” which translates as “There is a red spot in Jupiter, which rotates mathem[atically].” (Again, yes, there’s the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, but there was no way for Kepler to have known that at the time.)

It’s hard to believe that Kepler could twice unravel a Galileo anagram and twice make accidental predictions about the solar system. While the first story is widely accepted, the second is viewed with far more skepticism.

But either way, it just goes to show that anagrams, while delightful, might not be the best method for announcing your great discoveries.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Macho Vanquish Fizgig Jukebox edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today, I have another brief installment of Puzzles in Pop Culture.

Friend of the Blog Eric Berlin passed along this link about some puzzly fun lurking at the theaters last weekend.

Apparently, the top ten box office draws over the weekend formed a pangram!

For the uninitiated, a pangram is a sentence, paragraph, or other written item that contains all 26 letters in the alphabet. Not only do many puzzlesmiths endeavor to make their puzzles pangrams, but there’s a whole subset of puzzlers dedicated to writing short, hilarious, and immensely crafty sentences featuring all 26 letters.

The classic pangrammatic sentence — one many of us remember from typing class — is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” But that’s got a lot of repeated letters, and true pangram devotees try to repeat as few letters as possible.

(My personal favorite pangram? “Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.”)

But this weekend, thanks to films like The Equalizer, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, we’ve got a box office pangram!

This is the sort of puzzles-in-plain-sight fun that I love, seeing clever people spot patterns most others would miss.

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Listen close! Your ears are playing tricks on you…

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I enjoy writing posts about optical illusions because they’re puzzles that engage a solver in very different ways than normal pen-and-paper puzzles do. They rely on perspective trickery, playing on assumptions made by the brain on a level we rarely consider, often causing us to disregard what’s right in front of us.

[Those white circles are the same size…]

But there’s an audio version of this phenomenon as well, the mondegreen.

Mondegreens are misheard lyrics or phrases where homophones or soundalike words get substituted for the actual words. There are a few truly famous ones, like “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” from Jimi Hendrix’s song Purple Haze, or “The girl with colitis goes by” instead of “The girl with kaleidoscope eyes” from The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Now, mondegreens aren’t to be confused with malaprops, which are quite similar. Malaprops are words or phrases mistakenly used when another is intended. Archie Bunker from TV’s All in the Family, for instance, was a master of malaprops, unintentionally garbling the English language with classics like “Buy one of them battery operated transvestite radios.”

The term mondegreen comes from writer Sarah Wright, who misheard the last line of a stanza from a ballad called “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray.”

[Castle Doune, where the Earl o’ Moray resided…]

The actual stanza reads:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And laid him on the green.

But Sarah heard:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

My personal favorite mondegreen emerged from a viewing of Star Wars: A New Hope with a friend. In the famous scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi senses the destruction of the planet Alderaan, he utters the words “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”

My friend leaned over to me and whispered, “I’ve always wanted to ask someone this. Why oysters?”

Now, both my friend and I had seen the movie countless times before. We know the original trilogy backwards and forwards. So you can understand how completely baffling I found his question.

“What did you just say?”

“Why oysters?” He paused. “Millions of oysters cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.”

I figured he was pulling my leg. With dozens of viewings of the film between us, he couldn’t possibly believe Obi-Wan had been saying “oysters” for the last thirty years, right?

But apparently, he had. When I finally broke the silence by replying, “Voices. Voices, not oysters,” a look of realization washed over his face. “Oh, well that makes WAY more sense.”

And therein lies the true charm of the mondegreen: we find ourselves preferring the humor and silliness of the misheard version.

After all, you can’t simply go back to hearing “Hey, where did we go” after a friend enthusiastically belts out “HEY RODRIGO!” when Brown-Eyed Girl comes on the radio, can you?

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But I have all the koalafications!

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Good cluing is one of the cornerstones of quality crossword writing. Not only do the clues have to be interesting, clever, and challenging, but they need to be accurate as well. After all, there’s a big difference between playfully misleading and misleadingly wrong.

Thankfully, this is the Golden Age of cluing assistance, and there are numerous cluing archives and websites loaded up with crossword clues galore. Places like Crossword Nexus, Crossword Tracker, Wordplays, and XwordInfo are searchable, not only allowing constructors to look for new clues, but assisting solvers with troublesome clues.

It also makes researching crossword controversies a whole lot easier, like Hugh Stephenson’s koala-centric kerfuffle in The Guardian’s crossword blog.

You see, fellow puzzlers, a setter named Qaos used the following clue in a cryptic crossword:

Bear a left, then a right, then reverse (5)

This clue was intended to point toward the answer KOALA, both with the word “bear” and the directions “a left, then a right” — meaning A L, A OK — “then reverse” — KOALA. But some solvers took issue with Qaos referring to the koala as a bear, despite the common vernacular term “koala bear.”

Now, if we’re going by strict dictionary definition, those solvers are correct. The koala is a marsupial, not a bear. Of course, dictionaries were recently amended to say that “literally” no longer just means “literally” — it can mean “figuratively” as well. So I’m inclined to go beyond the dictionary definition and plumb the depths of crossword clue archives to see where the crossword community as a whole stands on the question of koala vs. koala bear.

The Crossword Solver lists the clue [Australian “bear”], but mostly avoids the controversy with a litany of clues like [Gum leaf eater], [Australian critter], and [Down Under climber].

If you go to Crossword Tracker, you mostly get clues that hedge their bet, like [Australian “bear”], [Marsupial sometimes called a bear], and [Australian bearlike beast], but there are a few hard-nosed clues like [It isn’t really a bear].

Crossword Giant agrees on this front, while Wordplays wavers wildly, citing both [Cute “bear”] and [Cute bear] in its archives.

I’d hoped for a definitive answer when searching XwordInfo, which is dedicated to clues featured in the New York Times Crossword. The Shortz era comes down firmly on the side of “bear”, not bear, but the pre-Shortz era is less rigid, with clues like [Living Teddy bear], [Bear of Down Under], and [Kangaroo bear].

And while I feel that the koala vs. koala bear issue remains unresolved, Mr. Stephenson is firmly in the koala bear camp, jokingly citing the 1983 Paul McCartney / Michael Jackson collaboration “Ode to a Koala Bear” as evidence.

Of course, if we’re going to start citing songs as evidence, that means “pompatus” is a real word, and that opens a whole new can of worms.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: Fond Farewell edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

By this time, you know the drill. Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and bring the PuzzleNation audience up to speed on all things puzzly.

And today’s update is all about constructor Robin Stears.

You’ve probably seen her puzzles in various Penny Press magazines, not to mention her delightful Team StearsWords mailings and products. She’s a prolific and creative constructor, a longtime friend of the blog, and an all-around good egg whose body of work spans two decades of terrific puzzling.

So I admit, I was a little sad to see her latest blog post a few days ago.

In short, Robin is taking time away from crosswords to embark on a new adventure: returning to college to study mathematics, in the hopes of sharing her love of math with the world.

While I’m overjoyed to see her tackling new and exciting challenges, I must confess that as a fan of her crosswords, I’m a little sad. Robin’s crosswords always feature clever, topical themes and fun entries, and her support, humor, and friendship over the last two years has been wonderful. She has always been unflinchingly kind and generous when it comes to PuzzleNation, granting interviews and contributing her wisdom, drive, and expertise to several blog posts.

Robin, I wish you the very best in starting a new chapter in your life. For many, many reasons, thank you.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

Crosswords, Cryptics, Constructors, and… Setters?

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One of the privileges of writing two or three posts a week for this blog is that it pushes me to expand my own horizons when it comes to puzzles. I reach out to puzzlers, game designers, and pop culture personalities of all sorts; I try out new games and puzzles; I obsessively scour the Internet for new projects, new products, and new stories that involve puzzles.

Oftentimes, that continuous search takes me beyond the borders of the United States, allowing me to explore what puzzles mean to other countries and cultures. And I am forever intrigued by the differences in crossword puzzles between America and the UK.

The world of cryptic crosswords (or British-style crosswords, as some call them) is a bit different from the world of American crosswords. Instead of constructors, they have compilers or setters, and while constructor bylines and attributions were a long time coming on this side of the Atlantic, setters in the UK have been drawing loyal followings for decades, thanks to their unique and evocative pseudonyms.

While Will Shortz, Merl Reagle, Patrick Blindauer, Brendan Emmett Quigley, Patrick Berry, Trip Payne, Matt Gaffney, and Bernice Gordon represent some of the top puzzlers to grace the pages of the New York Times Crossword, names such as Araucaria, Qaos, Arachne, Crucible, Otterden, Tramp, Morph, Gordius, Shed, Enigmatist, and Paul are their word-twisting counterparts featured in The Guardian and other UK outlets.

In fact, beloved setter Araucaria will soon be the subject of a documentary. For more than 50 years, he challenged and delighted cryptic crossword fans, amassing a loyal following. In January of 2013, he even shared his cancer diagnosis with the audience through a puzzle in The Guardian.

While the Wordplay documentary, as well as interviews on PuzzleNation Blog and other sites, have given solvers some insight into the minds and lives of constructors and setters, it’s wonderful to know that the life of a fellow puzzler will be chronicled in so intimate a format.

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