Interesting Facts

The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.

“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”

The following is the entire list of 100 words Every High School Graduate Should Know:

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat

It's a pity that I didn't know many of these words!

Meaning

A great deal of fuss over nothing of importance.

Origin

This phrase is sometimes shortened just to 'much ado'. It is of course from Shakespeare's play - Much Ado About Nothing, 1599. He had used the word ado, which means business or activity, in an earlier play - Romeo and Juliet, 1592:

"Weele keepe no great adoe, a Friend or two."

The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and per se and", meaning "and ( symbol which by itself (is) and". The Scots and Scottish English name for & is epershand, derived from "et per se and", with the same meaning.

Traditionally, in English-speaking schools when reciting the Alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "&" and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression "per se" (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus, the recitation of the alphabet would end in: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.

Through folk etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications, and that people began calling the new shape "Ampere's and."

Forty Chapters can be termed as ‘A Novel Writing Wizard’, you move one step at a time, defining each attribute of your novel, starting from the name, then characters (their name, their characters and all), later you define the acts, and finally you start with the chapters.

Once you are done with your writing, or at any point of time if you feel like exporting your work, as shown in the animation, you can download your manuscript in any one of the available formats, namely text, PDF, Word.

I found interesting anagram poems when I searched the term ''Anagrammatic poetry" in google.

The poem below, in yellow, was written by Shel Silverstein. Below it, in rose, is an anagram of the poem created by Meyran Kraus. It scans and rhymes well, paraphrasing the original remarkably closely. Such anagrams take a lot of time and patience to produce.

The Little Boy and the Old Man
Shel Silverstein

Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."
Said the old man, "I do that too."
The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."
"I do that too," laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, "I often cry."
The old man nodded, "So do I."
"But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems
Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
"I know what you mean," said the little old man.

And here is the anagram poem:

The Tot and the Elder
Olin Foblioso & Billy Foblioso

The tiny tot went: "When I eat I mess up."
The elder replied: "O, that makes two of us."
"I soil myself," went the tot with shame
And the elder added: "O, I do the same."
On the tot told him: "I sob a lot."
"O, not only you," answered gramps to the tot.
"And what's totally bad," the tiny tot told,
"I think mom and dad don't love me at all."
While grandpa simply, pitiably smiled,
then said: "O, I understand, my child."

Article idea: http://www.fun-with-words.com/anag_short_long.html

What is the meaning and origin of beat around the bush?

Sometimes when someone asks us a question, we try and avoid answering it. It's not because we don't know the answer; the answer is rather embarrassing. Therefore, instead of giving the person a direct answer, we go about answering his question in a roundabout way. This indirect way of answering questions is called 'beating about/around the bush'. Very often, people beat about the bush in order to conceal their intention.

*For God's sake, stop beating about/around the bush. How much is it going to cost?

*Will you please stop beating around/about the bush? Just answer my question.


The expression comes from the rather cruel sport of 'batfowling'. In this sport, people ('batfowlers') entered the forest during the night and proceeded to kill 'fowls' (birds) with the 'bats' or clubs they were carrying. The batfowlers and the servants that they took with them used to scare birds by beating around the bush in which they were sleeping. The sleepy birds, dazed and confused by the sudden commotion, would then fly directly to the bright lights that the men were carrying. Here they were beaten to death. The men who were beating about the bush were not really interested in the birds that were sleeping there. Therefore, when someone beats around the bush, he is concealing the thing that he is interested in; he doesn't come to the point directly.

Artivle idea: From The Hindu magazine dated on october 7.

In literature, a red herring is a narrative element intended to distract the reader from a more important event in the plot, usually a twist ending.



The term "red herring" originates from the tradition whereby young hunting dogs in Britain were trained to follow a scent with the use of a "red" (salted and smoked) herring (see kipper). This pungent fish would be dragged across a trail until the puppy learned to follow the scent. Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odor of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring (which has a much stronger odor) across the animal's trail at right angles. The dog would eventually learn to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent.

In literature, the most commonplace use of a "red herring" is in mystery fiction. One particular character is described or emphasized in a way that seems to throw suspicion upon that character as the person who committed the crime: later, it develops that someone else is the guilty party.

This is used in cryptography as well!

In cryptography, a red herring is a second hidden message that is intended to be discovered more easily so that the real message remains hidden to anyone who might intercept the transmission and break the red herring code. Only the intended receiver would know the key to unlocking the real message.

I had previously posted on ambigrams.This post contains two ambigrams which I missed out on my previous post.

Do you see human face or some other word?



Is this Chinese language???
See the image after 90 degree rotation!

An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce other words, using all the original letters exactly once.

For example:

Eleven plus two=Twelve plus one
Astronomers=Moon Starers.
Dormitory=Dirty Room

Famous writers used anagrams in their story plot to make them interesting...
JK Rowling(Harry potter series)
Tom Marvolo Riddle=I am Lord Voldemort

And Dan Brown(The Davinci code)
So dark the con of man=Madonna of the Rocks
O Draconian devil, Oh lame saint.=Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa

used these anagrams in their respective books......

Then comes the pangram.

A pangram , is a sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. (All letters from A to Z are present atleat once).

For example,
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

They are interesting only when they are small and funny!!!!
And if you are a regular reader of my posts,you must have noticed that
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,is a bug in the microsoft word.
When you type "=rand (200, 99)"and press enter you will see this pangram typed continously,for more than 100 pages!!!!!!.

Next I would like to introduce lipograms to you.

It is the opposite of pangram.
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is missing, usually a common vowel, the most common in English being e. A lipogram author avoiding e then only uses the 25 remaining letters of the alphabet.

For example,

This is an unusual paragraph. I'm curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it. It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it! In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out! Try to do so without any coaching!

It is interesting only when you construct lipograms avoiding the vowels.(A,E,I,O,U).
Writing a lipogram is an easy task for uncommon letters like Z, J, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E.
Well-written lipograms are rare, providing a challenge to writers seeking challenges.

Now this is the last word play i would like to mention,the Letter bank.
This is my most favourite wordplay!!!
A letter bank is a type of anagram where all the letters of one word (the "bank") can be used as many times as desired (minimum of once each) to make a new word or phrase.

For example,
IMPS is a bank of MISSISSIPPI,
SPROUT is a bank of SUPPORT OUR TROOPS

Are you interested in wordplay?
Well,why wait?
start playing then..........

I found them to be interesting enough....to make a post out of them...

Ambigrams are infact more interesting than anagrams....

Now,What is an ambigram? An ambigram is a graphical figure that spells out a word not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation. The text can also consist of a few words, and the the text spelled out in the other direction or orientation is often the same, but can also be a different text.

There are many type of ambigrams.Of which i have listed out few.....

1.Rotational
A design that presents several instances of words when rotated through a fixed angle. This is usually 180 degrees, but rotational ambigrams of other angles exist, for example 90 or 45 degrees. The word spelled out from the alternative direction(s) is often the same, but may be a different word to the initially presented form. A simple example is the lower-case abbreviation for "Down", dn, which looks like the lower-case word up when rotated 180 degrees.

2.Mirror
A design that can be read when reflected in a mirror, usually as the same word or phrase both ways. Ambigrams that form different words when viewed in the mirror are also known as glass door ambigrams, because they can be printed on a glass door to be read differently when entering or exiting.

3.Figure-ground
A design in which the spaces between the letters of one word form another word

5.Fractal
A version of space-filling ambigrams where the tiled word branches from itself and then shrinks in a self-similar manner, forming a fractal. See fractal of the word TREE as an animated example.

6.3-dimensional
A design where an object is presented that will appear to read several letters or words when viewed from different angles.

7.Perceptual shift
A design with no symmetry but can be read as two different words depending on how the curves of the letters are interpreted.

8.Natural
A natural ambigram is a word that possesses one or more of the above symmetries when written in its natural state, requiring no typographic styling. For example, the words "dollop" and "suns" are natural rotational ambigrams. The word "bud" forms a natural mirror ambigram when reflected over a vertical axis. The words "CHOICE" and "OXIDE", in all capitals, form a natural mirror ambigram when reflected over a horizontal axis. The word "TOOTH", in all capitals, forms a natural mirror ambigram when its letters are stacked vertically and reflected over a vertical axis.

After this book's publication,awareness on ambigrams has increased.

Hope you find the ambigrams as interesting as I found them...

But beware!!!!once you start designing anagrams you become addicted to them.....

I CAN READ This! CAN YOU ?