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Wordplay Forum Tips and Guidelines

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ESquared

Programmer
Dec 23, 2003
6,129
US
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, Making an Impression, 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 participating—thank 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 thoughts. Inventing something? Post it here. Repeating something? 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]
Code:
[white]Your answer[/white]
[/ignore]

This will look like:

Code:
[white]Your answer[/white]

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 partial anagrams 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 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 online dictionary. 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 by—and is paid for on a monthly basis by—a 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!

E², forum owner
 
The Making an Impression forum doesn't seem to exist...

Penny :)
 
The Making an Impression forum is alive and well. forum1256

Good Luck
--------------
To get the most from your Tek-Tips experience, please read FAQ181-2886
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein
 
As soon as they get post editing back online, I'll fix the link.

-------------------------------------
A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.
 
I'm sure you considered making this (first post) into a FAQ?

________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ222-2244 first

'If we're supposed to work in Hex, why have we only got A fingers?'
 
Hey johnwm,

Good idea. For some reason, I was thinking the member-moderated forums didn't have FAQs. Is it new since the makeover or was I just blind? :)

-------------------------------------
A sacrifice is harder when no one knows you've made it.
 
It's new [smile]

________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ222-2244 first

'If we're supposed to work in Hex, why have we only got A fingers?'
 
btt For those of us who can't remember how to do this!
 
btt?

-------------------------------------
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary, and those who don't.
 

ESquared,

Some of them had FAQ before, but you couldn't enter them through the forum, only through that control on each post inside a thread "Check out the FAQ area for this forum". Your forum could have had it before, too, I don't remember.

 
It would also be nice if the MVP display worked (I think it is not updated properly) and I could award multiple stars to someone in the same thread.

Right now, though, I'd like to see all the old functionality back like editing and deleting posts. And clicking on "Group Administration" gives a cold fusion error.

It isn't much of a member-moderated forum when there's no ability to moderate.

-------------------------------------
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary, and those who don't.
 
ESquared
From what I can gather, they're doing a complete rebuild using totally different tools. I suspect any lack of functionality is unintentional.

The problem seems to be lack of testing / resources. It may take a while to iron out the "infelicities", but I'm sure they'll get there... eventually.

Rosie
"Never express yourself more clearly than you think" (Niels Bohr)
 
How about this: don't switch over to the new system until it is completely built and tested... ?

-------------------------------------
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary, and those who don't.
 
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