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

[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.