Wordplay Forum Tips and Guidelines

Greetings Earthling,

Welcome to the Wordplay forum!

Here are some tips and guidelines to help everyone get the most out of participating.


Forum Purpose

[ul]As the forum description says, this is a place for anagrams, puns, spoonerisms, palindromes, jokes, and puzzles... or anything, as long as it hinges on playing with words!

Please note, however, that there is another forum here on tek-tips, [link http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=1256]Making an Impression[/link], which is geared toward general language discussion.

Since the two forums both involve words and language, it could be easy to mix up content. For that reason, you may sometimes be asked to move content to the other forum. It's great that you're participatingùthank you! But we want to be good neighbors and complement that other forum instead of compete with it.

If you are asked to move your post to the other forum, then after some reasonable period (so people have a chance to see your message) the thread may be deleted.

One possibly useful distinction is that this forum has an additional focus on your original solutions to puzzles or challenges. Inviting people to wrack their brains to invent or solve a problem? Post it here. Discussing language or repeating other people's content? Post it there.[/ul]



Tips And Terms

[ul][li]Hiding Answers - In order to not ruin a puzzle for others, when you post an answer, hide it from initial view by making it white on white using TGML as follows:

[ignore] [/ignore]

This will look like:


To see what's inside the box you must select it. Either press Ctrl-A or click and drag with your cursor.

[/li][li]Anagram - Rearranging the letters in a word to make another valid word. A full anagram uses all the letters. A partial anagram uses some of the letters. For example, the word editorializers has the full anagram radiosterilize and many [link http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=radiosterilize&include=&exclude=&d=&n=&m=&source=adv&a=n&l=y&language=english]partial anagrams[/link] of which one is solitaire. Sometimes an anagram is performed on more than one word with the goal of finding a new word or phrase with an interesting or unusual meaning. For example, an anagram of parliament is partial men.

[/li][li]Palindrome - A special case of an anagram: a word or phrase that is the same forward or backward (by letter). Examples are radar and ten animals I slam in a net. I am interested in a variant where a complete sentence says something else entirely in reverse. I'll have to invent a name for it.

[/li][li]Spoonerism - A construction made by swapping the initial sounds of two words. Generally, a spoonerism is not based on spelling. The supposed origin of the word is from Mr. Spooner, a college professor, who once berated a student by saying, "You've tasted the whole worm!" (You've wasted the whole term.) Exactly what is the right way to spoonerize is debatable. My personal preference is to use the first consonant blend. So in the case of lip stain I would choose stip lain over slip tain. The rules become even more muddy when there is no initial consonant, as in the name Edgar Everson. (Ever Edgerson?)

[/li][li]Acronym - A construction made of the initial letters of a phrase, possibly excluding "small words." For example, SWAT Team is constructed from the phrase Special Weapons And Tactics Team. Technically, in a construction of this form, if the letters are named it is an initialism (e.g., FBI, Federal Bureau [gray]of[/gray] Investigation), and only if it is pronounced as a word is it an acronym (e.g., SCUBA, Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus). However, recent usage generally applies the word acronym to both kinds. In my mind, an initialism is as much an "across-name" as an acronym, so how the result is pronounced is irrelevant to the construction and I use acronym for both. Consider SQL: it is pronounced both ways, see-kwel and ess-kyu-ell. And FBI could some day be pronounced Fibby. Who knows?

[/li][li]Word transformation - The goal of these puzzles is to change one word into another in a series of steps, altering only one letter in each step. For example, if one were asked to change HAIR to FOAL, a four-step answer could be:

[tt] HAIR
[tt]F[/tt]AIR
FAI[tt]L[/tt]
F[tt]O[/tt]IL
FO[tt]A[/tt]L[/tt]

For clarity, the letter that has changed in each step is in bold. Some transformations may offer additional operations such as adding a letter or performing an anagram at each step.

[/li][li]Valid Words - When answering puzzles, or if challenged on your answer to a puzzle, please be prepared to support your answer with a reference to an [link http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?SQID=877551&SPID=1322&page=1]online dictionary[/link]. When the word in question is submitted, there must display a matching dictionary or thesaurus entry. The entry need not be the exact word entered, but must logically be the root or equivalent of the word.[/li][/ul]



Forum Administration

[ul][li]Please note that this is not a tek-tips system forum. It was created byùand is paid for on a monthly basis byùa user.

[/li][li]In order to encourage participation and help reduce misunderstandings, the forum owner may at times elect to delete or edit a post. My philosophy is that in most cases, it is best when someone has publicly put his foot in his mouth to allow him a chance to also publicly remove it, so such actions should be rare.

[/li][li]If you make a mistake in your post, and then post again with a correction, do not be surprised if the correction is applied to your post and the new message is deleted. If a discussion has arisen about the mistake, then the mistake will be left as is.

[/li][li]Should you have any questions or concerns about anything at all in the Wordplay forum, be it about administration, puzzles, or average yearly rainfall in the Amazon basin, either post a message in a new thread, or send an email to user vorpalmage at domain hotmail at top-level domain com.[/li][/ul]



I appreciate your interest and participation in the Wordplay forum!

E¦, forum owner