Alphabetical (49 page)

8.
EYE-RHYME

Here you have to write a limerick or a four-line verse in which the words that would normally rhyme must only
look
as if they would rhyme, but in fact don't. These are words like ‘threat' and ‘eat', or ‘south' and ‘youth', or ‘was' and ‘has' and so on.

9.
HOMOCONSONANTISM

Pick a text, e.g. a proverb or famous quotation or newspaper headline. Remove all the vowels. Fill the letters you have left over with any vowels whilst keeping the consonants in the same order and using only those consonants. The result must make some kind of sense!

So, ‘Many hands make light work' would give you:

m, n, h, n, d, s, m, k, l, g, h, t, w, r, k

which you could turn into:

‘Me? No. He needs my keel. Go, hot, wee Rik!'

10.
LEFT-HANDED AND RIGHT-HANDED LIPOGRAM CONVERSATIONS

This is for touch-typists only. The left-handed text can be constructed using only the letters you tap with your left hand. The right-handed text can be constructed using only the letters you tap with your right hand. The challenge is to turn this into a conversation between the two hands.

11.
PRISONER'S CONSTRAINT

A prisoner is so short of paper he must maximize his use of it. He decides to not use any letter which extends above or below the smallest letters. This excludes: ‘b', ‘d', ‘f', ‘g', ‘h', ‘j', ‘k', ‘l', ‘p', ‘q', ‘t' and ‘y'. He (i.e. you!) now has to write poems or letters to his loved ones, or letters to his fellow criminals with messages about plans to escape or rob a bank.

12.
MEMORY-JOGGING ALPHABET

You have forgotten the alphabet, so you need a way of remembering it. So, you create words with each letter which will enable you to remember it. These must include the sound of the letter-name in each word. You can run the letter-names of two or more letters into one word, if you like. You're allowed to cheat. Here's a start:

‘Abey, see de effigy?'

If it's too hard to do the whole lot, make up phrases for sequences of any part of the alphabet.

Another layer of this challenge is to come up with a clue for the sequence you've invented and ask someone to guess which part of the alphabet you're talking about. So the clue for the one above might be: ‘A biblical figure, known by his nickname, is asked if he can see the statue.'

13.
WORD LADDER STORIES

Many quiz and puzzle books invite puzzlers to turn a word like ‘head' into ‘tail' in as short a possible time by removing one letter at a time, while retaining real words. Lewis Carroll called these doublets.

HEAD

HEAL

TEAL

TELL

TALL

TAIL

So, (1) solve a ‘doublet' challenge set by one of these puzzle books and then (2) use these words to make a story or, better still, a short poem. You don't have to tell the story using the words in the same order that they appear in the ‘doublet'.

You can turn this into a challenge by inviting the reader of your story to guess the correct sequence of the ‘doublet'.

14.
PALINDROMES

Some words are the same whichever way you write them: ‘pip', or the name ‘Hannah'. Some words are mirror images of each other: ‘star' and ‘rats'. You can also make phrases and sentences which read the same way in reverse. The most successful is perhaps:

‘A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.'

The challenge is to make up a palindrome phrase or sentence – short or long – that makes sense.

15.
NORDEN AND MUIR

Denis Norden and Frank Muir used to play a game on the Home Service (now BBC Radio 4) in which they took a well-known phrase, saying or proverb and twisted it to mean something else whilst still retaining much of its original sound. ‘Yon solitary Highland Lass' became ‘One solitary nylon lash'.

Having distorted the original phrase, the trick is to make up the story which leads up to this new phrase being its last line. You can play it by having a book of quotations and proverbs to hand, and one player challenges another with the well-known phrase which the challenged player must then change and invent a story to fit it.

16.
SNOWBALL

Your text starts off with a one-letter word and continues by adding one letter at a time:

I

am

the

fool

whose

mother

accuses

generals

viciously . . .

. . . and so on.

17.
THE MELTING SNOWBALL

This is the opposite of the snowball – it starts long and ends up with a one-letter word, though you could get away with a one-digit number for this last spot!

18.
ANCIENT HEBREW ENGLISH

Ancient Hebrew was written with no vowel letters. Ancient Hebrew English is a procedure which requires you to write notes to one another with no vowels (including ‘vowel y' as in ‘rhythm' or ‘lovely') in order to investigate if we need vowels or not.

19.
THE NEW VENTRILOQUIST

When the new ventriloquist starts to speak for his dummy ‘Charlie' he tries to say words that include letters that make his lips move, but everyone can see straightaway that he is speaking. He decides to avoid all words with letters that require lip movements: ‘b', ‘f', ‘m', ‘n', ‘p', ‘v' and ‘w'.

This Oulipo procedure requires two people, one to play the ventriloquist speaking as himself, the other to play the ventriloquist's dummy. The dummy must not say words which include the letters ‘b', ‘f', ‘m', ‘n', ‘p', ‘v' or ‘w'. The person playing the ventriloquist can try to trick the dummy into saying these words. Set a time limit, then swap over.

20.
ALPHABET ELIMINATION

You write out the alphabet. Then, you take it in turns to (a) remove a letter from the alphabet and (b) spell a word that would have normally used that letter.

This new spelling must be convincing enough to make the word sound more or less the same. Also (c) once a letter has been removed, you can't use it to spell a word.

So, the first player might eliminate ‘B' and spell ‘thumb' as ‘thumm'.

Cross ‘B' off the alphabet.

The second player might eliminate ‘C' and spell ‘ceiling' as ‘seeling' . . .

Cross ‘C' off the alphabet.

And so on . . .

Last one standing, wins.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wouldn't have had the state of mind or outlook on language to write this book if it hadn't been for my parents Harold and Connie Rosen and my brother Brian who were (and in my brother's case, still is) fascinated both by language and the ways in which this fascination can be shared.

I had many teachers both in school and at university who tried again and again to coax me into taking an interest in French, German, Latin, Old, Middle and Modern English, language, literature and literary theory. In particular, I owe a thanks to the people I knew at the time as Mr Brown, Mrs Hill, Mrs Young, Mrs Turnbull, Mr Emmans, Mrs Emmans, Mike Benton, Alan Ward, Ian Donaldson, Dennis Butts and Tony Watkins.

Professionally, I owe it to producer and editor Simon Elmes that I was asked to present BBC Radio 4's programme about language
Word of Mouth
, and a Radio 3 series on the history of European languages,
Lingua Franca
. Amongst the many exceptional contributors I owe a special debt are David Crystal, Jonathon Green, Tony Thorne, John Carey, Bernard O'Donoghue, Oliver Taplin, John Wells and J. C. Smith.

My ears and eyes would not have been as open to popular traditions of literacy if it hadn't been for work, interviews and conversations with Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd and Dick Leith. Aside from my parents, my interest in very young children's literacy, literature and culture has been fostered by encounters
with June Factor, Henrietta Dombey, Myra Barrs, Morag Styles, Brian Alderson and Margaret Meek Spencer.

The book includes many references to anonymous children – including my own – who've shown, sung and told me many things to do with language in use, so thanks to all of them.

The origins of the book lie in conversations with its editor Georgina Laycock who has enthusiastically kept up a flow of suggestions and edits. Any errors are mine.

My wife Emma has encouraged, challenged and supported the work while surviving much distracted head-slapping, muttering, swearing, midnight note-making, book-piling, paper-dropping and conversation-interrupting that has accompanied the writing. Love and special thanks to her.

FURTHER READING

Augarde, Tony,
Wordplay: The Weird and Wonderful World of Words
(Jon Carpenter, 2011)

Bengough, J. W.,
The Up-to-date Primer, a first book of lessons for little political economists in words of one syllable with pictures
(first published 1895; facsimile edn Peter Martin, 1975)

Berniere, Vincent and Primois, Mariel (compilers),
Punk Press
(Abrams, 2013)

Brown, Michelle P.,
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts
(The British Library, 1991)

Campbell, George L. and Moseley, Christopher,
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets
(Routledge, 2012)

Chalmers, G. S.,
Reading Easy 1800–50: A Study of the Teaching of Reading
(The Broadsheet King, 1976)

Chiaro, Delia,
The Language of Jokes
(Routledge, 1992)

Comenius, John Amos,
Orbis Pictus
(first published 1659; facsimile edn Oxford University Press, 1968)

Crystal, David,
Spell it Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling
(Profile Books, 2012)

David Crystal,
Txtng: The gr8 db8
(Oxford, 2008)

Davison, William,
Halfpenny Chapbooks
(Frank Graham, 1971)

Garfield, Simon,
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts
(Profile, 2011)

Gaur, Albertine,
A History of Writing
(Cross River, 1992)

Hartley, Sarah,
Mrs P's Journey: The Remarkable Story of the
Woman Who Created the A–Z Map
(Simon and Schuster, 2001)

Hilton, Mary, Styles, Morag and Watson, Victor (eds),
Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600–1900
(Routledge, 1997)

The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes
(first published 1766; facsimile edn Griffith and Farran, 1881)

Immel, Andrea and Alderson, Brian,
Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book: The First Collection of English Nursery Rhymes: A Facsimile Edition with a History and Annotations
(Cotsen Occasional Press, 2013)

Jean, Georges,
Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts
(Thames and Hudson, 1992)

Johnson, Paul,
Runic Inscriptions in Great Britain
(Wooden Books, 1999)

Kendall, Joshua,
The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture
(Berkeley, 2010)

Lommen, Mathieu (ed.),
The Book of Books: 500 Years of Graphic Innovation
(Thames and Hudson, 2012)

Loxley, Simon,
Type: The Secret History of Letters
(I. B. Tauris, 2004)

Man, John,
Alpha Beta: How Our Alphabet Shaped the Modern World
(Headline, 2000)

Mathews, Harry and Brotchie, Alastair (eds),
Oulipo Compendium
(Atlas Press, 2005)

Mavor, William,
The English Spelling-Book, accompanied by a progressive series of easy and familiar lessons intended as an introduction to the English language
(Longman, 1822)

Michael, Ian,
The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870
(Cambridge University Press, 1987)

Neuberg, Victor E.,
Popular Education in Eighteenth Century
England
(The Woburn Press, 1971)

Okrent, Arika,
In the Land of Invented Languages
(Spiegel and Grau, 2009)

The Oxford-Duden: Pictorial English Dictionary
(Oxford University Press, 1981)

Page, R. I.,
Runes
(British Museum, 1987)

Parkinson, Richard,
The Rosetta Stone
(British Museum, 2005)

Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation
(first published 1836; facsimile Huntington Library 1980)

Pitman, Ben,
Sir Isaac Pitman: His Life and Labors
(first published 1902; General Books, Print on Demand)

Robinson, Andrew,
Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts
(Thames and Hudson, 2009)

Sacks, David,
The Alphabet
(Hutchinson, 2003)