Celebrity Anagrams
A-list, B-list, and C-list mix it up.
There were some notable comments on yesterday’s piece about soundalike words with not a single letter in common. Dan and Tyler M consulted Ripley’s Believe It or Not to confirm KAUPHY and discover YOWZITCH, an alternate spelling of USAGE using “eight wrong letters and none of the correct ones.” USAGE and YOWZITCH would be a total of 13 letters, edging out KAUPHY/COFFEE’s 12.
Like “kauphy,” “yowzitch” appears in no vetted dictionary. It was an entry in a “misspelling contest” in 1895. Another resource claims it appeared in legal documents from “Cromwell’s time,” i.e., the 1650s—I can find other references as far back as 1778. (One source claims USAGE/YOWZITCH is a record recognized by Guinness, but that seems to be an error.) It’s more archaic than “kauphy,” but it might qualify—and all it really needs is some inventive wordsmith to bring it back into fashion.
Tyler also suggested trying Roman numerals, which really opens things up! The largest unmodified Roman numeral (in numerical terms) is just shy of 4,000. Working backward from there, the longest combination is MMMCCCLXXIII/THREE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED SEVENTY-THREE, for a total letter count of 49. Some would add an “AND” before SEVENTY-THREE, taking that count to 52.
Where you draw the line on this question is, to some degree, up to you. But I applaud the ingenuity at work here…which humbles me again, because I would not have found “yowzitch” or thought of Roman numerals on my own. My thanks to you, attentive readers!
…
What celebrities have the same letters in their names? Well, how do you define “celebrity,” anyway?
Of course, celebrity is a matter of opinion, beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, fame is fleet, yada yada. But you need some more concrete basis to decide these things. So I consulted IMDBPro, which uses a proprietary algorithm to track which people in the movie and TV business are getting the most attention. Its rankings change by the day, but not so fast that a snapshot of the top 10,000 won’t be useful for a while. (Barry Keoghan, star of Saltburn, is currently #1.)
There are, of course, celebs outside show business, but this still seemed the best way to start. Sampling the top 10,000 or so, I found six anagram pairs:
Diane Lane has appeared in Unfaithful, Under the Tuscan Sun, and the more recent Let Him Go, as well as a couple of films as Superman’s Earth mom Martha. (Not to be confused with Batman’s Earth mom Martha.) Diane Neal played Casey Novak in Law and Order: SVU, then Abigail Borin (a recurring guest role) on both NCIS TV series.
Jason Lewis is probably best known as Smith Jerrod, Samantha’s longest-term, most serious boyfriend in Sex and the City; he competed for one episode of the latest season of Dancing with the Stars. Jason Wiles was a regular as Bosco on Third Watch throughout the show’s six seasons. Both also appeared in Beverly Hills, 90210 and Six Degrees, but not in the same episode.
David Keith had his best roles in the 1980s, playing the male leads in An Officer and a Gentleman and Firestarter, but “the Deek” showed up elsewhere until the mid-2000s. Keith David has had over 300 roles, most recently as Willy the Wonker in American Fiction, and his narration work has won him three separate Emmys. As a voice actor, his best-known role is probably Dr. Facilier, the villain of The Princess and the Frog. Both of them appeared on Hawaii Five-0, The Outer Limits, and Arli$$—but not in the same episode.
Ryan Hansen, as Wikipedia has it, is “best known for starring as Dick Casablancas on the noir drama series Veronica Mars, as Kyle Bradway on the Starz comedy series Party Down, and as Nolan in the horror remake film Friday the 13th. He also played a fictional version of himself in the YouTube series Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on TV. Ryann Shane has had two starring roles playing daughters—a rebel teen in Banshee and a girl facing her father’s worsening dementia in Lights Out.
Maya Erskine was the co-creator and co-star of the fantastic teen comedy series PEN15; she is set to star with Donald Glover in the new spy series Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Afghan actress Yasmine Aker has had recurring roles in the TV series Good Trouble and FBI.
John Cena is probably the biggest star on this list—a wrestling god who’s delighted audiences in films like The Suicide Squad, Bumblebee, and F9. Joan Chen came to American audiences’ attention with The Last Emperor and has since divided her career between Hollywood and Chinese film, appearing in Americanese and recently in A Murder at the End of the World.