Wordplay

[cjsmith]

[Poll #1100080]

I was something like thirty-eight when I had a sudden insight that these words might be related. I felt phenomenally stupid for not having seen it before. It's not like I've never studied a Romance language or somehow never in my life encountered that scent for soap.

Then I started telling friends, and so far, they've all responded with variants of "What do you mean, obvious? How the @#$! would you come up with something like that? Weirdo."

This is the kind of thing I wonder about a lot. Is there any relationship between the endings of "lavender" and "provender"? How many pairs of words used to follow the pattern "bear"/"birth" (verb -> vowel change + "th" -> noun) before we dropped those usages, and just how much does "death" count as one of the last remaining examples? If a pantler had charge of the pantry (bread = pan), and a hostler worked at a hostelry, did a butler (bottles, wine) ever at any time in the language have anything like a "butry", and are "gentry" or "gantry" even remotely related to this pattern?

Um, sorry, I'm just kind of like this. :-)

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I certainly didn't mean you shouldn't have put this question up. My poll choice was "Let's talk about whether they really are, shall we?" and I proceeded to do so.

Personally, I get more excited when I find words that "should be" related but aren't, because those are excellent "flat bases." In the National Puzzlers' League, we have these word puzzles called "flats" and the answer is called the "base" of the flat. Bases are typically sets of words that have morphological similarities and can be related through a brief poem, but which are not allowed to be etymologically related. Flats are poems that incorporate the base words, but with the actual base words replaced by cuewords.

An example may clarify: The following flat would be marked BEHEADMENT (5, *4) (*4 = not M-W) (which simply means "MOLD takes the place of a 5-letter word; OLD takes the place of a 4-letter proper noun that is not an entry in any Merriam-Webster dictionary; delete the first letter of the 5-letter word and you get the 4-letter word).

Dr. Frankenstein cried, "OLD!
This body's hours old, and dead.
MOLD has set in. He's getting cold.
Now, where'd you put his precious head?"

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't take it that way -- no worries!

I'm almost frustrated by the etymology related to livid. It seems like a much weaker link, in terms of phonemes, than lavare (especially if you take into account the Italian lavanda, "a washing"). Since the dictionaries go ahead and reference lavanda as a "related" word, why is the link with livid considered stronger? This fascinates me.

Thank you for more information on flat base puzzles. I followed the previous link and didn't clue in. Would the puzzle be posed simply as this poem? Would the "BEHEADMENT(5, *4) (*4 = not M-W)" label be included? Does the four-letter proper noun have to rhyme with cold?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Would the puzzle be posed simply as this poem? Would the "BEHEADMENT (5, *4) (*4 = not M-W)" label be included?

The tagging and enumeration appear above the poem, where the title usually goes. And, yes, the poem and its tagging and enumeration are usually all you get. (The main exceptions are what we call rebuses -- which are not what most people call rebuses -- and their derived types. Those have a "rubric" as well as the poem.)

Does the four-letter proper noun have to rhyme with cold?

No, the cuewords have to scan and rhyme in context but the solution words do not have to do either.

There's a more detailed explanation along with a "mini-sample" issue of The Enigma at the National Puzzlers' League website (http://www.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=mini:start), if you're interested.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Do the solution words have to have meanings that make sense in the poem? For example, does the five-letter word have to be something that can "set in" on a dead body?

(I think I've solved that one... FINALLY. Much as I love words, word-game puzzles have an incredible ability to make me feel like the slow child at the back of the classroom.)

Thanks!

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Yes, they do have to make sense, including agreeing in number, part of speech, and tense with the rest of the sentence --- although not necessarily with the cueword. Devilish constructors will throw you off by having a word in the poem that is read one way with the cueword and as a different part of speech with the solution word.