A Small Journal Puzzle
What's life without a little challenge?
Lori Wike sent me this remarkable line of poetry for the Journal.
ID LEERED, THERE ALCHEMISTS SWEPT
This one line, as Lori designed it, actually represents an entire haiku. But how can this be so?
I’ll leave that as a bit of a stumper for now. The next update, offering up the answer, will run about 24 hours after this late one (and after that, I’ll go back to the usual schedule). ’til then!
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Hi T,
I don't know if this is Lori's solution to her puzzle, but if you take her base line ID LEERED THERE ALCHEMISTS SWEPT and strike out letters from it in three different ways, you can generate these three haiku-forming lines:
"Idle ethereal mists!"
I'd leered; "There alchemists swept,
Ere real chemists wept!"
Note that the first line only works if we accept Merriam-Webster's syllabification of "ethereal, which is "ethe-re-al," three syllables. The Oxford American Dictionary, for one, gives the word four syllables:
"e-the-re-al." (Personally, I'd syllabify it "e-ther-e-al.")
Jim Puder