Wordplay Failures

Sure to be one in a series!

I get a lot of ideas for wordplay exercises to put in this space. Some of them do not work! Or rather, they don’t work as posts of their own, but maybe they’ll work as part of this piece about otherwise discarded projects? Let’s find out.

There were a few pieces in Word Ways #8.1 (1975) that I wanted to riff on. Yesterday’s piece came out of one of them. In “Literary Cardinals,” Darryl Francis found some non-numerical definitions for the numbers:

Francis’ list includes the numbers 0 to 36, then ten more digits up to 50 (leaving gaps at 37, 39, 43, and 47). It’s amazing how much slang can change in fifty years, but in this case, the well has gotten shallower. I bogged down at 19:

0. A nobody.

1. A neutral pronoun.

2. A simple shot with multiple actors.

3. A certain basketball shot.

4. A power forward.

5. A short rest (Take five).

6. Behind (Watch your six!).

7. An English river.

8. A full night of sleep.

9. A unit of reliability.

10. A perfect specimen.

11. A very high level of intensity.

12. The police.

13. Marijuana.

14. N.

15. An Irish traybake.

16. Musical notation.

17. American youth magazine.

18. A certain-sized keg of beer.

And I’m not totally happy about some of those, either!

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I thought about doing a comprehensive update of “Hark the Bark,” an article about words for dog sounds in different languages. But I hit diminishing returns on it pretty fast—after a while, it just looks like a bunch of random sounds. If you’re interested in that, though, you can hit this link.

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If you spell out any number, then count its letters, then spell out that number and count its letters and so on, you will eventually end up with four. 19,234,921—NINETEEN MILLION TWO HUNDRED TWENTY-FOUR THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE—63—SIXTY-THREE—10—TEN—3—THREE—5—FIVE—4—FOUR. That’s because FOUR is the only number in English that describes how many letters it has.

Pretty cool, but I don’t have anywhere else to go with that. Not like Sidney Kravitz did!

…Okay, I have a little more. There are a few terms in English that are synonyms of their letter-lengths. Leaving out 1 and the Roman numerals I, II, and III, I found…

A (as an article or to signify the first in a series), quad, quint (usually in cards), sextet or sestet, heptade, octonary.

That’s a little something! Not a post’s worth of something, though.

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This issue also mentions the remarkable sentence Jill’ll love me. You can form other sentences or fragments with five of the same letter in a row, even a few with six. But I can’t find any that feel as natural as Jill’ll love me unless they also use the ’ll contraction, like Jill’ll like me or Hell’ll look familiar to you. ‘

For six letters, I tinkered around with something like The Anschluss’s SS soldiers, but I couldn’t get real invested in any wordplay to do with Nazism just now, for some reason.

Is it possible to get…eight? I found myself thinking it’d be real convenient if there was a movie franchise that ended in one or more i’s. Something like Hawaii I-III, I imagine. Or Hawaii I, II, III, and IV.

For five letters… Subpoena AAA archives? Hammurabi III identified? Fax XXX xeroxes? They’re all imaginable enough. But none’s nearly so elegant as Jill’ll love me. That really is a thing of beauty. (Note to self: what about a remake of The Emperor’s New Groove titled Jill’ll Llama-ify Me? Workshop this.)

Tomorrow: Crosswords of 1918!