Last time out, I chronicled some of the work of early puzzlemaker Samuel Danforth. I also looked forward to unpacking his introduction of the anagram to this hemisphere.
Reader, I owe you an apology. I jumped the gun there. As it turns out, my celebration of that second achievement was premature.
To mark the death of the Reverend William Tompson, Danforth composed two sonnets, prefacing each with an alleged anagram of Tompson’s name. However, neither is a true anagram:
William Tompson, anagram 1: lo, now I am past ill…
William Tompson, Anagram 2: now I am slipt home.
“William Tompson” has one fewer A, one fewer L, and one more M than “lo, now I am past ill.” But at least it’s using the common letterbank WILAMTOPSN. Unfortunately, “now I am slipt home” has an H and an E that the reverend’s name lacks (plus one fewer L), so it doesn’t even meet that requirement. This is just sloppy work and, as such, shouldn’t be more than a historical footnote.
I also checked the aforementioned sonnets to see if they were anagrams or letterbank-mates of each other. No dice.
Why’d I test for letterbanks when Danforth called these “anagrams”? Because I couldn’t be sure Danforth was defining “anagram” the same way I was.
And that’s the great irony of wordplay studies: the words used to describe wordplay are looser than they should be.
Consider the pretty word “logology.” As I mentioned here, I considered using Logology as the title for what became The Journal of Wordplay, but I let it go when I realized “logology” has too many meanings besides “recreational word studies.” It can mean the study of logo designs, a kind of theology, or the study of science. The word “ludolinguistics” is more precise but not nearly as pretty.
What’s a homonym? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s sometimes a soundalike word with a different spelling and meaning (e.g., there for their), sometimes a lookalike word with a different sound and meaning (e.g., lead the element for lead the verb), and sometimes a lookalike, soundalike word with a different meaning (e.g., quail the bird for quail the verb).
We usually call the first type a “homophone,” though some sources confuse that term, too. For the second type, Webster suggests “homograph.” (I’ve also seen “homogram.”) But a lot of sources still use the vaguer “homonym.” And the last type—do we think quail the bird is a different word than quail the verb, or is “quail” just one word with multiple meanings? You know, like “homonym” or “logology”?
Oh, and by the way—what about words that look different but sound alike and mean the same thing, like “cay” and “key,” “ax” and “axe,” “donut” and “doughnut”? We usually call those “variant spellings,” but it seems like they should be homo-somethings. (And is “cay”/“key” a partial case, since “key” has some meanings that “cay” doesn’t?)
I’m more sensitive to these issues than most people, but the multiple meanings of “acrostic” have even tripped me up. Acrostic can refer to a poem with a vertical pattern between its lines, like the Babylonian Theodicy, or to a somewhat crossword-like anagram puzzle. There’s no good substitute word for either type of “acrostic,” and it wasn’t always worth a digression to discuss that distinction. Mostly, I’ve crossed my fingers and hoped the context made it clear which kind of “acrostic” I meant.
Sometimes we just have to muddle through with the terminology we’ve got. Still, the word-loving community could be a lot clearer about things like this than we are.
You’d think we would, right?