Alphabet Soup
Ow! The summer holidays are over (for us lucky okes in the southern hemisphere) and we have gained more than a few kilos of undesirable extra weight. So I’m sitting here wondering what to write that will take my mind off food. Maybe I can start with the A-B-C.
I wonder if they arranged the letters of the alphabet in that order so that it matches that childrens song?
The (English) alphabet has 26 letters … only 26, but in various combinations they make for an awful lot of fun! Most English speaking people know at least a few thousand words made up of only those 26 letters.
Some of those letter combinations are very common across some languages (e.g. “hello“) and some words are useful when in need (e.g. “where is the toilet please“).
When I was a young technician at IBM we were taught that we should test a keyboard by typing the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” because it uses all 26 of the letter keys.
But a small percentage of words are playful and they give us wordsmiths reason to smile (for example over at Misscellania). Recently I played with special combinations of letters called palindromes (words that are spelled the same forward and backward and mean the same both ways e.g. “eye” or “madam“). But what is a word that is spelled the same forward and backward, and mean something completely different (e.g. now -> won or live -> evil)? They are not really special anagrams. Are they maybe called “confusonyms” or “transposals” or “semordnilap” (Wikipedia)?
And guess what? When I Google it the first 8-letter reversible word is dessert -> stressed. Unfair, I cry! Its a conspiracy! I don’t seem to be able to get away from food! It is haunting me! And too much desserts makes me stressed out! Aargh!
I’m giving up. I’m going to raid the refridgerator. Oh, what’s the fridge magnet saying? A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion. KFC anyone?
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June 10th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
I really love to eat lots of different kinds of soup specially vegetable based soups.
June 18th, 2010 at 4:39 am
got to yahoo to your page and it displayed strange but after refresh everything displayed good. Just thought id let you know and keep up the good work
August 1st, 2010 at 8:03 pm
i love all sorts of soup but my most favorite soup is none other [than] chicken or beef soup.
October 25th, 2010 at 10:27 am
chicken soup and beef soup is always the best tasting soup in my honest opinion. i love the taste of both.
December 13th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Very nice website.
December 22nd, 2010 at 9:52 pm
oh well, i always love the taste of chicken soup and other soups, i am a soup addict you know *`’