Words as playthings

Sometimes the message is the medium

I find the kind of wordplay the readers of my Boston Globe column, “May I Have a Word,” engage in plenty engaging — but what the contributors to The Journal of Wordplay get up to regularly astounds me, as I was reminded when the latest issue landed with a thud in my email inbox earlier this week. Those folks look at language in ways that would never cross my mind.

For instance, one feature in the new issue, titled “Quadruple and Sextuple Book Title Anagrams,” presents one quadruple and one sextuple anagram, illustrated with the books’ covers. That is, there’s a book titled Pastel (“one of the lesser-known works of English author Georgette Heyer”), one titled Petals (“a 2003 book of photographs by California photographer Nick Karras. [What they are photographs of is interesting—look it up!]”), one titled Plates (“one in a series of books by Mary Engelbreit on home decoration”), and one titled Pleats (“a book on that subject by well-known sewing expert Lois Ericson”).

And then, there are Slate, Stale, Steal, Stela, Tales, and Tesla, followed by the challenge “Is it possible to find a seven? Perhaps, but it won’t be easy!”

Or how about some “Automynorcagrams,” “a kind of backronym”? That descriptor could scarcely be more confusing. Mynorca is acronym spelled backward, but that’s beside the point, the point being that the letters of the first word of a basic automynorcagram are the initials of all the words in it. “Consider: This hits in sequence.”

But it was the series of articles about supervocalics and euryvocalics that blew me away. The first of these articles begins by explaining: “A supervocalic word is one containing just one each of the five vowels AEIOU. Familiar examples include EDUCATION, HOUSEMAID and SEQUOIA. A euryvocalic word has one each of AEIOUY. Again, familiar examples include AUDIOMETRY, EQUIVOCALLY and FACETIOUSLY.” Why these names? They’re self-descriptive. Supervocalic is supervocalic, and euryvocalic is … Well, you get the idea.

Already I’m thinking, Who looks at those or any words and sees them from the point of view how many of which vowels they contain?

But why stop at just one of each vowel?

“The investigation of supervocalic items has also explored those with a double helping of AEIOU(Y), and even triple and quadruple helpings of the 5 (or 6) vowels. For example:

“ULTRAREVOLUTIONARIES (2 x AEIOU)

HIROSHIMA PEACE CULTURE FOUNDATION (3 x AEIOU)

WILLIAM A. BOOTLE FEDERAL BUILDING AND U.S. COURTHOUSE (4 x AEIOU)”

That is where my mind started boggling, and it kept doing so through the presentation of a spelled-out number that contains exactly 240 occurrences each of a, e, i, o, and u. Even more remarkable was the result of a 25-year-long quest: “an entry for all 720 possible sequences of vowels in euryvocalic phrases.”

Some of the sequences yielded more than one option. So “one entry was chosen to represent each slot. The goal was simply to make the results as lively as possible — a combination of people, places, and things notable for some attribute or accomplishment, minimizing obscurity and duplication.” As in: aeiouy half-seriously. aeioyu Hammermill Copy Plus. aeiuoy Shake It Up! Boy! … yuoaie xylulokinase. yuoiea syrup of ipecac. Wow.

To know that there are those who, rather than spending their free time insulting people on the internet or working to curtail others’ freedoms or stockpiling automatic weapons or doing any number of things I wish they wouldn’t, peacefully play around with words and letters for their own enjoyment and the enjoyment of like-minded others bucks up my faith in humanity. Here’s hoping it does something similar for you.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.