Tuesday, 20 November 2018

Enthralling WORDPLAY Nov '18 #2

WORDPLAY post #145
Periodic postings of palindromes, Scramble-Town Maps (creative cartography), binomial phrases, etc. 


SONGLINK: For those readers who like poetry set to music: You can find lots of singable limerick-medleys and other spoofs on our sister blog "SILLY SONGS and SATIRE", such as this recent post






HOT LINKS to collections of Classic/Goofy Palindromes #1,#2,#3




Review the entire collection of anagram-town names (based on 
P-A-L-I-N-D-R-O-M-E-S) here.




HOT LINK to NEW WORLD PALINDROMES - complete series



Thursday, 15 November 2018

VERSUM TERSUM: Limericks for LOVERS of CLASSIC LANGUAGES


SATIRE COMPOSED: Giorgio Coniglio, September 2018. The involved verses have been published at OEDILF.com, an online humor dictionary that has accumulated over 100,000 carefully edited limericks.





Authors' Note:

mus (MOOS): Latin for ‘mouse’
puer (POO-er): 'boy', a prototype Latin noun, often used in early lessons to introduce the topic of declension
faex: Latin for 'dreg', 'sediment' or 'deposit'
faeces: the more familiar plural form

The author has several decades of experience in attempting to get trainees who had never studied Latin to use Anglo-Latin words appropriately in medical reports. 
Presumably, Linnaeus' associates and protégés in 18th century Swedish academia were all well-versed in Latin.




Authors' Note: 

gigeria: Latin term for the delicacy 'cooked bird entrails'; forerunner of the old French term gisier, from which our use of gizzard is derived

garum: highly popular Roman sauce made from fermented fish intestines, used equivalently to our catsup

Gourmands in ancient Rome were notorious for their consumption of exotic (and in modern terms yukky) foods of all sorts



Authors' Note: Our seer in Byzántion likely made his prediction in the early 4th century A.D.

Byzántion: Greek name for the Greek colonial city-state founded on the Bosporus in pre-Roman times; known in Latin as Byzantium, it lent its name to the subsequent Byzantine Empire

Konstantinoúpolis, and Constantinopolis: Greek and Latin names respectively for the expanded city, planned as his empire's eastern capital (Nova Roma) by Roman emperor Constantine; known in English as Constantinople

Hagia Sophia (ah-yah so-FEE-ah) Greek for Holy Wisdom; famed for its huge dome, the third iconic church built on the site served as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral from 537 A.D. until 1453, the year of conquest by the Ottoman Turks

Istanbul: capital of the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently of modern Turkey, the city's current population of 15 million (2017) makes it Europe's most populous city.












Authors' Note: In its earlier versions, the Hebrew alphabet was a pure abjad, or consonantary, with over twenty consonants, but no vowel sounds. The modern script used today has five symbols which may assist in the vocalization of vowels. In certain specific usages (poetry, teaching children, studying ancient texts, books of prayer used in the diaspora), a system of diacritic marks under the letters indicates the standardized vowel sounds. Without them, as in the majority of informal printed texts and in handwriting, you have to know some grammar, and have a moderate vocabulary of root words (often consisting of three consonants) to solve the meaning.   




ANACHRONISTICALLY

Anachronistically, Horace

Checked his word-use in Roget's "Thesaurus",

While his poet-bud Ovid

Got a bad case of COVID

(These events occurred eons before us).
Dr G.H. and Giorgio Coniglio, 2022
This verse can now be found in the collection 'Creative Anachronisms)

Authors' Note: 
bud: shortened form of the word buddy (friend)
Roman poets Horace and Ovid are discussed in other verses on this site.
Roget's "Thesaurus" was initially published in 1852, although it had been compiled much earlier, in 1805.







If you want to resume daily titillations on our other public blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time-frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 and 2021. (There are now 700+ daily entries on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.)





You can also find a singable version of "Anglo-Latin" on our sister blog "SILLY SONGS and SATIREHERE


Saturday, 10 November 2018

Unthrottled WORDPLAY Nov '18 #1

WORDPLAY post #143
Periodic postings of palindromes, Scramble-Town Maps (creative cartography), binomial phrases,  etc. 

SONGLINK: For those readers who like poetry set to music: You can find lots of singable limerick-medleys and other spoofs on our sister blog "SILLY SONGS and SATIRE", such as this recent post




Review the entire collection of anagram-town names (based on 
P-A-L-I-N-D-R-O-M-E-S) here.





HOT LINKS to collections of Classic/Goofy Palindromes #1,#2,#3



HOT LINK to NEW WORLD PALINDROMES - complete series



Monday, 5 November 2018

U.S. ELECTION WEEK REVIEW: A Look Back at our 2016 Prediction

WORDPLAY POST #141: REMINISCENCE and PREDICTION


SATIRE COMPOSED: Giorgio Coniglio, March 2016, revised February, 2017.
SONGLINK: On "SILLY SONGS and SATIRE", post #122, a parody-song "Election-Race Anagrams" deals with the distribution of anagrams based on the words R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-N-S and D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T-S.
 As shown below, a non-biased assessment using an automatic anagram generator suggests that Republicans would have a yu-uge advantage over Democrats in a contest based on the number of anagrams; however, the generation of plausible anagrammatic locales incorporating postal codes is a more complex matter, and results in a tighter 'race' than would otherwise be expected. A conspiracy theorist might note that the word 'ruble' is embedded in the word "REPUBLICANS", but the editor does not wish to give any credence to such a possibility. There is however some relation between anagrams derived and party leanings, policy and support that is shown in the 2nd slide.
  This material was developed before the election of November 2016, with the initial hope that it might be helpful in predicting election results. Many of the factors in the analysis have remained unchanged today in 2018, although there are some new twists. Many of the same factors contribute to today's analysis, including the mysterious role of the word 'ruble'. 


CLICK HERE TO REVIEW
http://www.edifyingnonsense.com/2017/02/creative-electoral-cartography.html




And, a bonus electoral analysis map for interested readers who are into ANAGRAMS...