Wordplay is an irresistable pasttime; the urge to play with words can pop up while writing a dreary report, or in the middle of a friendly ego competition. The varieties of entertainment to be found are vast.
While alchemists struggled to turn LEAD into GOLD, I spent months trying to turn OUNCE into POUND. I wish I had had a list of five letter words, which also comes in handy when playing jotto. Of course, this also meant many hours browsing the dictionary, during which I ran across more than anyone's share of weird words and words derived from letter names and special words
After knocking myself out for half a year compiling the five letter word list, it took me ten minutes to make a list of two letter words.
Who needs a list of itty bitty rhymes, inspired by the game of Stinky Pinky? Other lists of reduplicative rhymes include eye in the sky, flim flam, lucky duck, slap happy, surround sound, and tom tom.
And then there's unrhymes, words that ought to, but don't rhyme, rhyming slang, back slang, the Bingo Code, and silent letters that ought to, but don't make a sound.
What about a list of multinyms, a multiple homonym, or a single sound with three or four different spellings?
Then there are those equivocal words you can't figure out how to pronounce, the I-before-E words you can't figure out how to spell, and some odd words that end in AGE or ugly words that end in IZE.
Then there are a few bad names for characters of books or movies.
Pangrams are sentences that use each letter of the alphabet (at least) once, or multigrams that use one letter several times.
A silly acronym caught our attention, and we all jumped in to name the CTC.
The strange look of the word "vacuum" led me to listing words with two U's; then there are words that begin and end with the same letter.
One day, all the trucks that said "Danger! Inflammable!" were repainted to say "Danger! Flammable!" and it got me thinking about autoantonyms and antiautonyms.
Once, at the MIT Coop, I faced a paperback copy of Andy Warhol's "a", and thought I should begin the world's first collection of one letter book titles. Then I thought about numerical book titles and dated book titles.
You might want to explore the language known as Headline Pidgin or conventions of NPR radio articles that we consider in Taglines, and then there are Junk Phrases I'd prefer not to hear any more. And then there's the minor letter swap puzzle.
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