Harvey Beeferman

Plus a few odds and ends.

You may never have heard of Harvey Beeferman. But if you’ve enjoyed wordplay in the last 25 years, you’ve probably enjoyed the fruits of his labors, directly or indirectly.

As eulogized on his son Doug’s website, Harvey was a New York chemical engineer turned R&D vice-president, but his biggest impact came after his retirement. In 2000, he and his son co-founded Datamuse and purchased two 1996-created websites, ensuring their continued operation and improvement.

OneLook. RhymeZone. For nearly three decades, these names have been invaluable to lyricists, puzzle designers, and anyone who wants to use language effectively. I used OneLook just yesterday to build the lists of “A-to-Z” words seen here. I then used RhymeZone’s “sounds like” feature to help me compose puns. I’ll probably use them again next week. OneLook’s far-reaching approach—covering more than a hundred online dictionaries—is part of what makes it great. (Even if I do wish there was a “turn off Urban Dictionary” option.)

These resources have seen improvement in recent years, and they are, and have always been, absolutely free. Thankfully, Doug seems to share his father’s values: he also supports the local Dictionary Project, providing lexical resources for schoolchildren. So I can hope these go-to websites will remain with us for decades to come.

Harvey was an active volunteer throughout his time in the Lowcountry, heading up the Hilton Head Island Computer Club for many years. He also gave technical assistance to countless local nonprofits, creating their websites and becoming the “go-to” person for computer help for all of his friends and neighbors.

Harvey married Eileen McHenry in 2013 and they lived a life of adventure and enrichment, traveling abroad to 39 countries and sharing in the joy of raising six grandkids…In his free time he enjoyed going to jazz and classical performances with Eileen, and for decades he had a daily regimen of walking, cycling, and swimming.

A life well lived, and a footprint worth remembering. Rest in peace, Harvey.

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One think OneLook isn’t much help with is transadditions. Transadditions are like anagrams, only you can add letters from your starting word. (Transdeletions let you subtract letters.)

Yesterday, I wrote you couldn’t get an unrelated transaddition out of WUZZY, just as Darryl Francis claimed in 1971, more or less. He discounted FUZZY-WUZZY because it was a hyphenate: I’d discount it because it’s related to WUZZY. Francis claimed this was the shortest word for which this was true, and I saw no reason to disagree, having tested some alternatives. But Tyler M offered a correction—and improvements:

I would say that Mr. Francis was right about WUZZY at the time, but the word has since lost its distinction with the coinage of BUZZWORTHY (which M-W and OED both date to 1980)…

In its place I would nominate QAJAQ, a variant of KAYAK listed in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Even better would be WUVZ, a playful spelling of LOVES that has been entered into the English Wiktionary, though it is hard to find uses of this word outside of the realm of the lolcat.

I used this resource to test Tyler’s claims, and found nothing—but it didn’t have BUZZWORTHY either, not even in its largest dictionary. That’s a big oversight for a word major dictionaries accepted 44 years ago. (See how important OneLook’s comprehensive approach can be?)

So I switched to this one, which does have BUZZWORTHY (also BUZZWORDY). For QAJAQ, it has QAUJIMAJATUQANGIT, Inuit “traditional knowledge.” But it has nothing for WUVZ! Some word experts would no doubt disagree, but I’m prepared to give the award to WUVZ until further notice.

Tomorrow: Rare books and manuscripts!