Leon's Random Ramblings

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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Posted on January 13th, 2010 under Jokes, Words. Tags: Luvit!. RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.