In the 1929 Marx Brothers film, Cocoanuts, Groucho explains to Chico his plans to develop and auction some land in Florida. It’s one of their most memorable scenes, achieving immortality with the following dialogue:

Groucho: ”And here is the viaduct leading over to the mainland.”

Chico: ”Why a duck? Why a no chicken?”

All through the scene, Chico demands to know “Why a duck?” – his daffy take on the word viaduct.

Daffynitions are punny definitions and, like Tom Swifties, once you get going, they’re a hard habit to quit. Calvin and Hobbes fans might recall this daffynition for the word pronoun: “A noun that has lost its amateur status.” Other favorites of mine include indistinct: “Where a person puts the dirty dishes,” and parasites: “What you see from the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

I’m not sure we’re ready for the Best Daffynition in the world!! contest just yet, but have at it! Let’s see what you loyal Word Wrappers can come up with.

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[There's still time to get the vote out!]

I’ve read through the nearly 200 Tom Swifties you all sent in for The Best Tom Swifty in the World!! competition. And let me tell you, VERY impressive. Honestly, some of the best Swifties I’ve ever seen! After the jump, you’ll find my list of finalists (reprinted anonymously).

Now it’s time for you all to vote. As with our caption contests, all you have to do is drop your ballot in the comments. (And remember, only one vote per person, please. Remember my post on stat counters tracking your
IP address? Don’t think we don’t know who the cheaters are…tsk tsk.)

“May the best Tom Swifty win!” exclaimed Victor triumphantly.

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It’s been about a year and a half since I’ve mentioned Tom Swifties in the Word Wrap, so I thought I’d return to them once again for this giveaway because, well, they’re just so endearing (and so much fun!).
As I’ve said before, Lorrie Moore introduced me to these extraordinary puns in her story “Community Life” (one of the many brilliant shorts in her collection Birds of America). Some of the characters in the story are librarians and pass their downtime at work thinking up Tom Swifties such as, “I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly” or “There’s never been an accident, she said recklessly.”
The term “Tom Swifty” was coined in the 1920s and comes from a series of adventure books about a boy named – surprise, surprise – Tom Swift, who regularly employed a qualifying adverb like quickly or jokingly when he spoke. The series was written by Victor Appleton, who you might think you’ve never read. But there you’d be wrong, as Appleton was a penname for Edward Stratemeyer, the creator of The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew.
But back to Tom Swifties: to create one, all you need do is make a pun out of your qualifying adverb, such as Lorrie Moore did in this example: “This hot dog’s awful, she said frankly.”

So go ahead, try one and drop it in the comments below. We’ll pick one as The Best Tom Swifty in the World!! and send the talented winner a t-shirt of his/her choice from our store. Enter as many times as you’d like, so long as each is in a separate comment. Tom Swifties are easy. And once you start, you’ll be hooked, he said, casting about for his rod and reel. Okay, so that wasn’t a true Tom Swifty as there was no adverb. So I’ll leave you to your weekend with this one then: “David! Cut it out already, his readers said sharply.”

Oh, and be sure to tell use which t-shirt you want just in case we pick your Swifty as The Best Tom Swifty in the World!!

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I tend to be behind when it comes to technology. For this, I blame my parents, who, in 1985, were the absolute last ones in the neighborhood to get cable (anyone remember Prism?). Which is to say that my grandparent’s dog was watching HBO before I was.

Disclaimer on the table, I hope I’m ahead of the curve here by introducing you to OdioGo, the company pushing the technology that converts typed words on the Web to audio, either streaming through a flash-based plugin, or directly to you iPod/mp3 player.

Now, while I understand that there are, of course, many benefits to listening to your favorite sites (like the _floss, for instance) — especially for those with impaired vision – I, personally, prefer most of my online content text-based. That said, you simply must listen to this, if only for a good laugh. The excerpt on the play button below, spoken by Mr. Geekonastick (I presume), is from a story I “read” yesterday about a very interesting recent archeological find in Jerusalem. (Incidentally, when placing the plugin on your own Web site or blog, you can select the language Mr. Geekonastick reads in! They have everything from Arabic on up to Swedish there.)

So I ask: Is this the future? Do you want this man reading your content to you?

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For those word game lovers out there who’ve had the privileged of knowing Leonard Bernstein (or any of his friends or family) or, alternatively, read my novel Behind Everyman, you already know how to play Mental Jotto.

For those who didn’t know him or his posse and haven’t read my book (and judging by my Random House quarterly statements, that’s most of you), it’s time to learn one of my favorites.

First the background: As far as I know, this variation of Jotto was invented by Leonard Bernstein. So if you can’t prove me wrong, we’ll give the maestro the props. The original Jotto was was invented in the 50s by Morton Rosenfeld and put out by Jotto Corporation. The version I bought off eBay some years ago (pictured here) says Copyright 1972 by Selchow and Righter, so my assumption is they bought Rosenfeld out.

The object of the game: to guess your opponent’s secret word. (The only real difference between Mental Jotto and the paper/pencil version is that with the former, the only thing you have to work with is your brain. So it’s a) harder! and b) perfect for long drives or flights, or anywhere you need to pass some time.)

How you play: One player picks a secret 5-letter word. Any 5-letter word will do, but it mustn’t contain any repeating vowels or consonants. Why? It’ll be obvious by the end of this post.

1. Once you have a secret 5-letter word, your opponent must guess the word by offering up 5-letter words of his/her own.
2. For example: Let’s say you and I are seated next to each other on a plane and strike up a conversation. After some time, I decide to teach you Mental Jotto, because, I’ll admit it, I’m actually rather boring off-blog and wouldn’t have much to say to you otherwise. Okay, so we decide to play and it’s my job to come up with a secret word and your job to guess it.
3. So my secret word is plane – P-L-A-N-E – plane. (Notice: no repeating vowels or consonants, each letter appears only once.)
4. You try to guess my word by figuring out how many letters in your guess word are also in my secret word. So you offer, say, the word stump. You say, “David, how many in the word stump?” Meaning, how many letters are in common with my secret word.

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I’m not sure if you can read the text in the picture below, but it’s from a novel I’m presently writing. The sentence I’d like to bring to your attention is the one that reads: The person he was referring to was an acquaintance of mine… etc.
For fun, I had MS Word go through the document and underline what it thought were mistakes. For those of you familiar with this feature, you already know that a green squiggly under a word or phrase means the application has taken issue with your grammar. Clicking on the squiggly opens a window with suggestions on how to fix the problem.

So, in the sentence above, Word suggested, as you see in the box, the word be for was, which would have given me this sentence had I accepted it: The person he was referring to be an acquaintance of mine…
I smiled, as hopefully you just did, but then got to thinking about proper uses of the verb to be that sound all wrong to my ears, but actually aren’t.
Two came immediately to mind:

1. Though grammarians are still clinging to the proper antiquated use of the subjunctive mode in the was/were debate (what I call “the mode of doubt”) (correct: If I were you/incorrect: If I was you), they don’t seem to fret much over the loss of the following use of the subjunctive, which I’ve plucked from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline:

Act I, Scene 6: Iachimo: If she be furnish’d with a mind so rare, she is alone the Arabian bird…

Act II, Scene 3:Cloten: If she be up, I’ll speak with her…

Curious, ain’t it?
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Becky had a brilliant post a couple months back on vocab words. She recounted a segment she once heard on Rush Limbaugh where he said a person’s vocabulary stops growing at the age of 25. She also brought up words she discovered she was mispronouncing:

I could fill a month’s worth of posts on how many words I spent many happy years mispronouncing or worrying I was mispronouncing–an invocation of “palimpsest” was heavy on the “limp” until I finally learned either way (i.e. “pal” or “limp”) was okay, and my favorite grammar school vocab years was always “deSULtory.” I find it either takes a good friend or a bad job interview to correct such things.

Well here’s a third method to throw into the pot: loyal Weekend Word Wrappers’ comments. That’s right, I’m calling on all you readers to embarrass family members, friends, cohorts – even yourselves – by sharing with us stories of words mispronounced and how they/you learned to pronounce the word(s) correctly.

I’ll get the shameful ball rolling here with a word I always pronounced wrong, that is, until one day…

Sycophant – What I now understand about this word is that if most people have trouble with it, it’s usually in the definition, not the pronunciation. They think it has something to do with being ill or disgusting, rather than being toady. I never had that problem because I always pronounced it psychophant. That is, until I heard it used by Phoebe on an episode of Friends in the mid 90s. And that’s how I learned how to pronounce it correctly, if you can believe that.

What about you guys? The interactive part of the Wrap starts now!

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As promised a couple weeks back, today we present Tom Toce’s extremely clever and very challenging word puzzle composed mostly of cryptic clues and a few straight-up anagrams. If you’re just joining the fun, check out my last two Word Wraps to get up to speed.

I’m going to turn the floor over to Tom Toce now, but before I do, let me just wish all of you luck in solving this. First person to figure out which three words fit in the diagram below and slap ‘em down in the comments, along with an explanation of how you arrived at the answer (including how you solved the cryptic clues!) gets a copy of the mental_floss book, Instant Knowledge. May the best Wordie win!

 

Check out the clues after the jump…

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I know I promised Tom Toce’s big mental_floss cryptic puzzle today, but after my puzzle primer post, I thought you all could use just a wee-bit more practice. Today’s theme isn’t Einstein, rather Shakespeare, William Shakespeare (hint: William Shakespeare’s work, his name, anything, really, that can be tied directly back to William Shakespeare). Tom and I have put together 15 new clues – the harder ones are his, the real easy ones are mine. (read: blame him if this makes you feel dumb!)
First one to get ‘em all gets serious bragging rights. For those just joining us, you can check out my primer here, or any one of these great sites on how to solve cryptic clues.

1. Crushed oreo and milk top any romantic lover (5)
2. Bashful, secure, and a real Jew (7)
3. At the Center, Wilson netted 14 lines (6)
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I was tempted to categorize this post in my running feature, Things considered a big deal in Europe but not in the States, because, sadly, cryptic puzzles haven’t really caught on here like they have in England, where they were invented and popularized. Originally an extension of the crossword puzzle, Edward Powys Mathers is thought to be the first person to write cryptic clues exclusively (first for The Saturday Westminster in 1925 and then The Observer).

So what is a cryptic puzzle clue exactly? Well, the short answer goes something like this: it’s a clue that contains a word puzzle within it. To solve the larger puzzle, you first have to solve all the tiny puzzles buried in the clues. And, just to make your job more interesting, you also have to figure out what kind of puzzle the author is employing, as there exists a small pantload of different varieties. Because we’d be here all the-blog-long, I’m only going to run down a list of the clues you need to know today before I send you off on your own to solve some fun clues created especially for us by my friend Tom Toce. (For the seasoned puzzle solvers out there, feel free to skip on past this part.)

First off, almost every cryptic clue is divided into two parts: the definition and the wordplay. Sometimes the definition will come first, sometimes the wordplay will come first. Part of your job is to figure out how to read the clue before attempting to solve it. On top of all this, there will usually be a parenthetical number at the end of the clue, as well. Don’t freak out! It simply lets you know how many letters are in the answer.

Now then, here are six very common cryptic puzzle clue categories:

The Anagram clue: In this clue, one side of the clue contains an anagram. You will also find an anagram tip-off word, or indicator that lets you know there’s an anagram in the clue. Often-employed tip-off words include strange, mixed up, muddled, wild, and drunk. Here’s an example of an anagram clue:

A slice of meat looks strange on a skate (5)

So here, “a slice of meat” is the definition, found on the left side of the clue, while “looks strange on” is your tip-off that there’s an anagram in the clue and skate is the word to be rearranged. The answer contains 5 letters, so it can only be STEAK. Steak is a slice of meat and it’s also an anagram of skate.

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