"Sailor" (1 of 2)

What one word can do.

In “Caroline,” from Word Ways #4.2 (1971), Darryl Francis suggested a new approach to wordplay studies. “It would be a novel idea to select one word from the English language and then see what themes could be developed around that word.” I agree! Even now, most wordplay studies lean in the direction of organizing words around a theme instead. For his exercise, Darryl selected CAROLINE; at random, I’ve selected SAILOR.

This word has fewer possibilities in some ways but more in others. Like Francis, I’ll begin by exploring its definitions.

A sailor can be a professional crewperson on a naval or commercial sea vessel, especially one below the rank of officer. It’s also a person who goes sailing as recreation. There are other definitions, but we’ll come back to those later: these two will do for now.

Its funniest synonym is probably seaman. If you don’t know why, someone will explain when you’re older. SAILOR appears a fair amount in puzzles: the hardest crossword clues for it are “Salt,” “Tar,” and “One who works with an anchor.”

Sailor has no one-word anagrams. Its best two-word anagram is probably is oral, both a common phrase and an apt description. Sailors have to be loud on the job for crews to work together smoothly, and the image of sailors being loud off the job, while not universally true, is still true often enough to be an amusing image.

Francis plays with transadditions, which you get from anagramming after adding one letter. This gives us solaria, jailors, tailors, and possibly sailors. The well-known movie title Solaris also qualifies. Transdeletions (anagrams minus one letter) are loris, roils, orals, solar, rails, liars, rials, lairs, and liras.

At this point, Francis’ interests (or his 1971 interests) and mine diverge somewhat. He delves into transsubstitutions (anagrams with one changed letter), noting that there are 25 possible ones for every letter in CAROLINE for a total of 200. Even the 150 possible transsubstitutions for sailor strike me as more than I want to investigate: there are many other angles to explore.

Homophones are a rich vein to mine, as it turns out. Sailer is a lesser-used term for a sailboat, leading to delightful confusion when a sailor makes a sale, er, um, of a sailer. Say “Lir” or Say “Ler” is also appropriate, since Lir/Ler is a Celtic god of the sea. An additional homophone can be found in phrases like “sale or return.” One always hopes for a sailor return!

Is it possible to put sailor in a palindrome? Indeed it is:

Tide? Carol, I, a sailor, aced it.
Sloop on patrol. I ask sailor, “Tap no pools?”

One can form a word pyramid:

A
LA
AIL
AILS
RAILS
SAILOR

Sailor is an isogram: each letter in it only appears once. That’s not unusual for a six-letter word, but it means that s-a-i-l-o-r can serve as a letterbank. However, I can’t turn up many significant expansions of it: the best I can do is solar sail, which is nine letters to the original six. A more creative expansion would be the sentence As I ail, I rail; as I rail, I roil.

As a charade, sailor can be divided up into a question: Sail, or…? Another charade for it can be spoken by someone who recognizes Raphael the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle by his signature weapon:

Sai? Lo, R.!

Tomorrow: More of this tomfoolery.