Groundhog Day has come and gone. The groundhog poked its head up only to find it covered by a mountain of snow, so that means 100 more years of global warming. This seems as good a time as any to peer into the Word Play mailbag.
Douglas M. Simpson passes along a brain teaser that has been doing the rounds. Think of a nine-letter word from which one letter at a time may be removed, right down to the final single letter, with each stage being a legitimate word. A five-letter example would be brain, which becomes rain, which becomes ran, which becomes an, which becomes a. A six-letter example would be blather: bather, bathe, bath, bat, at, a. The nine-letter answer appears at the end of this column.
Michael Gillespie spotted an amusing typo in his local newspaper. A Jan. 24 letter to the editor quoted a statement "that a worker in the 'constriction industry' is 'twice as likely to lose his life as a member of the police force.' " Gillespie comments: "Who knew that boas are more dangerous than brawlers?"
Dave Valentine noticed a typo in a recent caption under a photograph of a woman looking for clients to buy her poultry. The cutline said: "A meat vendor waits for costumers in Shanghai ..." How appropriate, Valentine writes, that the woman was selling dressed meats.
A recent column on sound-alikes (for example, air and heir) reminded Peter Rempel of an item he read long ago in Reader's Digest. He offers a paraphrase: "An engineer recorded a report into a Dictaphone and asked his secretary to transcribe it. He read the hard copy with approval until he came to the final notation: 'The calculations for this report were accomplished with the aid of a sly drool.' "
Did anyone else do a double take when singer Elton John and partner David Furnish announced that their newborn son would be named Zachary Furnish-John? Will the lad have to go through life being asked whether he trafficks in bathroom supplies? John-Furnish wouldn't remove the tease factor, but it would be less obvious.
Mixed metaphors are always diverting. On CBC-TV's evening news on Jan. 6, NDP MP Pat Martin was unimpressed that Senator Raymond Lavigne continued to collect his salary and expenses even though the senator had been forbidden to sit in the Red Chamber while facing charges of fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice. Martin, unable to choose between two metaphors, threw caution to the wind and yoked them together, as I have just done there: "Surely the jig is up for the Senate, and this may be another nail in the coffin." Perfect, if someone is pining to dance.
A recent column looked at contranyms, also known as Janus words, which have two opposite meanings. For instance, oversight can mean both a mandate to observe and a failure to observe. Reader Kathryn Potgieter writes in to note the difference a preposition can make. "Dispense with," she observes, "means to discard or reject," while dispense "means to provide, as in dispensing justice or medication." Yet a building on fire can both burn up and burn down. Not for the first time, those learning English must wonder what they've got themselves into.
The next one is dated, but I can't resist, since the statement acquired a double meaning only after the phrase was written. A year ago, referring to the then-upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the magazine Corporate Knights carried this line on its cover: "Is this the greenest Olympics ever?" By green, it referred to environmental sustainability. Who'd have guessed that a lack of snow would threaten to make the Olympics literally green, as in bare patches at Cypress Mountain?
The nine-letter word is startling. The word left at the end is I. If you can think of another example, please let me know. Know: now, no, O.