As promised, I’ve started rereading Word Ways from start to finish. Now that I’m running a similar publication, it’s fascinating to see it through that lens. The first issue, published in 1968, leans heavily on material published from The Enigma, the magazine of the National Publisher’s League, in the mid-1920s!
Of its then-current contributors, the most mysterious was Edward L. Lee, who kicked things off with the amusing challenge to “improve” a simple American proverb, Ph.D-style. This meant rewriting it into scholarly impenetrability. His example:
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
While bryophytic plants are typically encountered on substrata of earthly or mineral matter in concreted state, discrete substrata elements occasionally display a roughly spherical configuration which, in the presence of suitable gravitational and other effects, lends itself to a combined translatory and rotational motion. One notices in such cases an absence of the otherwise typical accretion of bryophyta.
Edward asked readers to submit their own such “improvements.” He must not have been happy with the results, because he ran a different kind of “rewritten proverbs” puzzle in Word Ways’ second issue and didn’t pursue the matter further after that.
Edward vanished from the contributor list after its first year, when I was not yet born. I doubt he’s still around to appreciate this…but I figured, hey, better late than never.
The conversions below are mine. I have to confess, padding these out was more of a challenge than I thought it would be!
Actions speak louder than words.
In a polyculture grappling with babelism, the closest approximation of eloquent omnilingualism is purposeful operation, neither purely performative nor ambiguous, that can be observed by others. Lockean empiricism dictates that such multisensory observation leaves an impression that outstrips any impression given by merely verbal information, whether such verbality is experienced visually or auditorially.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Misemployment cannot rectify an established inadequacy, nor can prior iniquity justify misemployment, even if such misemployment springs from a compensatory purpose. Such transgressions are more likely to have reinforcing or multiplicative effects upon each other than to engage in any mutual cancellation.
Blood is thicker than water.
Kinship orientation endures across many sociological strata and evolving circumstances. While especially pronounced as familism, even a modest genetic connection, if identifiable or believed to be so, can create a tribalistic bond that provides comfort and biases decision-making in favor of its continuation.
Easy come, easy go.
Valuation is often assigned in quantities roughly commensurate with difficulty of acquisition, and property or service which requires little effort to acquire may prove prohibitively difficult to retain. Likely depreciation and probability of loss must be assessed as part of the quantification of one’s own assets and resources.
Better late than never.
While punctuality can be vital, even asynchronous accomplishment can exhibit value in limited contexts, and as such value cannot be predicted by existing statistical models, such accomplishment often merits exploration, if only for the experimental knowledge gained from its actualization and the observed results.
See also, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Feel free to add your own!
Well done! I love those early issues (I read them a few years back) and remember liking those improved proverbs. There’s some really great stuff from someone named Mary Youngquist in those first 5-10 years or so. Might be interesting to do features on some of those early WW contributors. And Will’s first publications (as William F. Shortz) are in there, I think mid or late 70s, and totally fascinating to read.