Category: Digital art
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Our 30th Ana(versary)gram!
I can’t let 2016 escape without noting that this was the year Cheri and I celebrated our 30th anniversary. Three adventure-filled decades ago, we committed ourselves to making our union “as a fortress for well-being and salvation”. That’s how Baha’u’llah describes it in the Prayer for Marriage. That, for us, has been the way it…
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One Word: Antigram
An antigram is an expression formed by rearranging the letters of another expression to mean its opposite. For example, “fluster” rearranges to spell “restful”. Other classic examples: “listen” = “silent”; “antagonist” = “not against”; “earliest” = “arise late”. The word “antigram” is short for “anti-anagram” – an anagram being any word or phrase formed by…
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A Grumpy Old Anagram!
A favorite quote of mine, from the 1993 movie Grumpy Old Men: “The first ninety years or so, they go by pretty fast … Then one day you wake up and you realize that you’re not eighty-one anymore.” – Burgess Meredith These words are spoken in the movie by the “Grandpa Gustafson” character (Meredith). I…
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Two Words: Forgo / Forego
What is the difference between “forgo” and “forego”? Are these just alternate spellings of the same word? No, these are words with distinctly different meanings. And sometimes devilishly hard to tell apart. So let’s fix that! To forego (with an “e”) means, literally, to “go before”. That telltale syllable “fore” is our clue: It normally…
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Two Words: Inept / Adept
Is “adept” the opposite of “inept”? Yes – and no. Both in sound and meaning, these words are near-perfect opposites. Their respective origins and histories, however, indicate they have nothing to do with one another. First, some history of my own: Back in the early Seventies, I was a reporter for the Tullahoma News in…
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The Healing Power of Anagrams
Cheri and I benefit from the work of two exceptionally gifted healers: Dr. Rocio Huet, our primary-care physician; and Dr. Craig Hennie, our chiropractor. I’m therefore pleased to note that the letters in “Rocio Huet, healer” rearrange to spell “Hoorah! Elite cure”. And that those in “Doctor Craig Hennie” also spell out “condition recharge”. In…
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One Word: Jocular
Are you ever jocular in your use of words? Well, you are, if you ever speak in a joking, humorous, playful manner. Till recently, I divided words and their usages into two categories: formal and colloquial. Formal speech follows the strictest rules and conventions. It’s conservative, prim, and proper. Colloquial speech is more relaxed. It’s…
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Irfanview: A Top-Tier Photo Editor
Irfanview is a small, lightning-fast, super-powered photo editor for Microsoft Windows. If you ever touch digital images, you need it. I promised recently to write about my favorite writing tools. Irfanview is one of them. This may seem strange. How is an image editor a “writing tool”? Writers need images and illustrations. Maybe not all…
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Jonah Miller’s “Shrill, Empathic Joys”
You do know I’m a science geek, right? The only problem being, I know very little about actual science! It’s a field – or rather, a collection of fields – for which I have no formal training, no math foundation, no research experience. What I do instead is read obsessively – books, magazines, blogs, and…
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One Word: Strengths
“Strengths” first caught my attention for being the longest English word with only one vowel. Longest, that is, in number of letters. There are other ways of measuring lengths. Nowadays, if we ask such a question on any Internet forum like Quora, while forgetting to specify letter-count, there’s no shortage of people to remind us…
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One Word: Brevity
“Brevity” is one of those words that exemplifies itself. Seven letters long, it’s the noun form of “brief”, which means short. “Brief” and “short” also are words constituting examples of themselves. Words that rhyme with brevity include “levity” and “longevity”. (This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)
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All the Candidates’ Anagrams
It’s that joyful season when anagram freaks (like me) dig deep to see what things we can spell by reshuffling letters in the names of leading candidates for President of the US of A. Break out your Scrabble blocks, and let’s begin. First, a note: When anagramming public figures, I shoot for humor – ideally…