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February 22, 2009

Connected by ambigrams

Punya Mishra blogs a “story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya writer and poet J. P. Das, and the father of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi.” It contains some of my favorite things: Reflections on the nature of the Web, “serendipitous connectability,” and Scott Kim-style ambigrams.

Ambigrams are words printed in such a way that they can be read in ambiguous ways. Sometimes they can be read backwards and forwards (even though they’re not palindromes), sometimes they can be inverted or flipped, sometimes they contain other words (e.g., “true” written in such a way that you can also read it as “false”). Scott Kim‘s book Inversions has long been a favorite of mine, and the current issues of the relatively obscure journal WordWays has another bunch.


Punya recounts how it came to his attention that none other than Mahatma Gandhi worked on writing his name so that it could be read at one and the same time in English or in Hindi. (He has provided a scan of the pages of the book by an Indian civil servant that discloses this.) The path to this discovery is unlikely, reaching through strangers, hyperlinks and family. And it leads to an ambigram by Gandhi!

(Note that I did indeed find this page by ego-surfing my own name, since Punya cites a book of mine. But, rather than attributing this to my own narcissism, let’s just attribute it to what Punya calls serendipitious connectability.) [Tags: gandhi wordways scott_kim punya_mishra ambigrams wordplay ]

 


WowTattoos has ambigrams for over 1,000 names, and a generator for words it doesn’t have. They’re not as beautifully clever as Scott Kim’s — they tend to look like gothic text — but it’s still pretty impressive.

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Categories: misc Tagged with: ambigrams • gandhi • misc • wordplay • wordways Date: February 22nd, 2009 dw

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February 16, 2008

Candidates’ anagrams (kind of)

The very odd journal WordWays (which really ought to become a Web-based journal, imo) in this issue runs a piece by A. Ross Eckler that anagrams uses the letters in the various candidates’ names to make phrases. [The strikehtrough is because I got this seriously wrong.] These are in order of the longest words that can be formed from the letters in their names, but that’s a different story:

JOHN MCCAIN = MACHO CON MAN
RUDY GIULIANI = I RUN GAUDILY
MITT ROMNEY = MY, I’M ROTTEN
FRED THOMPSON = HOT FOND SPERM
HILLARY CLINTON = RANT? I ONLY CHILL!

He lists none for Barack Obama.

[ADDED LATER: Here are some anagrams:

HILLARY CLINTON: ICY THRILL ON LAN

JOHN MCCAIN = CONCH IN JAM

MIKE HUCKABEE = I BACK MEEK HUE

BARACK OBAMA = AM A BACK AROMA
ARK.: A CAB, A MOB
O, MA! BACK ARAB!
A CORK, MA! ABBA!
BAM. A CRAB. A-OK.
BAA! ROAM BACK!

[Tags: wordways anagrams politics humor ]

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Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: anagrams • humor • politics • wordways Date: February 16th, 2008 dw

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