Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

Do you fancy yourself word savvy? Do you know the difference between a palindrome and an anagram?

If you want to mix things up quickly, Sternest Meanings: the anagram bot takes your input and flips the letters into an anagram.

Personally, I do favour palindromes over anagrams. Why do you ask?

Palindromes are useful for those lulls in cocktail chatter. Anagrams don’t have the same conversational cachet.

For example, if you experience a lull in your conversation, throw out this tidbit.

“Did you know the longest palindromic word in the Oxford English Dictionary is tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses for a knock on the door?”

If the response is a glassy-eyed look, continue with “of course you know a palindrome is a word or phrase reading the same forward and backwards.”

When you’ve piqued their interest, drop this factoid: “Semordnilap is a name coined for a word or phrase that spells a different word or phrase backwards. Like the word “straw” becoming “warts” or “star” read in reverse as “rats.”

Finally, kick them out of the ballpark with the final word on palindromes. Take a sip from your cocktail and breezily say, “‘Semordnilap’ is itself ‘palindromes’ spelled backwards.”

But I digress in my intellectual frivolity for idle cocktail banter.

Back to the anagrams. Here’s a few phrases I plugged into the bot and the anagram it produced.

• my phrase: Woe is me!
  sternest anagram: I owes me!
• my phrase: Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.
  sternest anagram: Charlatans of unhandsomely whore.
• my phrase: My mother became a nun after my father left her.
  sternest anagram: Tremble off-center yummy anathema. Eh! Farther.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 8:29:42 PM and is filed under WEBSTUFF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.