Word Play & Games

I guess there is a reason why I ended up putting words on paper for a living. Word games, puns, anagrams, palindromes and pencil puzzles that require unscrambling letters or phrases and turning them into a readable form that makes sense have always intrigued me.

I can create a multitude of variety word puzzles, but I won’t even attempt palindromes, so I admire those people who have minds that can create these words, phrases, or sentences that read the same forwards or backwards. The classic palindrome of course is ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.’ Imagine my delight when I stumbled across a small book, Palindromania, written by Jon Agee, which consists entirely of these delightful phrases and sentences, most of them new ones to me.

We all know the famous “Madam, I’m Adam”. This little book carried that phrase one step further, and created a cartoon consisting entirely of palindromes. In the first cartoon block, Adam is standing with a lady, and he turns to her and asks, “Eve?” In the second block, the lady responds, “Sir, I’m Iris.” In the third block, Adam stands there looking perplexed, and in the final cartoon block he extends his hand and says, “Madam, I’m Adam.”

Palindrome phrases such as “stressed desserts”, “salad? Alas!”, “Pull up”, “lonely Tylenol” and “Dennis sinned” may not be that hard to discover, especially for someone like myself who always reads words backwards anyway just for fun (‘stop pots’ always leaps out at me every time I see a stop sign while driving) but those who can create palindromic sentences amaze me. “Was it a car or a cat I saw?” “Nate bit a Tibetan.” “Deb sat in Anita’s bed.” In my book, these are absolutely delightful!

Other word games provide amusement as well. Anagrams can keep me entertained whenever I have to sit around in an office and wait for something or someone. Signs or notices on the wall give me ample opportunity to rearrange letters of one word into new words. ‘Smile’ can become miles, limes, or Emil’s, just by rearranging the letters. I like to find words that every letter makes a new word (time/item/emit/mite comes to mind). The best one of these that I’ve found is, of course, STOP, which makes six words, and each letter starts at least one of the words (stop, spot, pots, post, opts, and tops). Believe me, this little habit of anagramming words has saved my sanity on quite a few occasions when I had a longer than expected wait of two minutes or more and foolishly forgot to pack a book for such an emergency.

Word games are fun, they entertain, and they keep our brains working. A good variety pencil puzzle and word games book can keep me occupied for hours. I don’t particularly like the word search puzzles as they aren’t challenging, but I like the double occupancies, the crostics, the alphabet soups, the word drops, the crypto-families, the bowl-a-score challengers, and all other similar word games and puzzles that provide a break from the normal daily routine.

If you aren’t a fan of word games and puzzles, consider purchasing a good variety puzzle book and immerse yourself in this form of entertainment. After all, keeping our brains active helps prevent a multitude of ills, including dementia, and as far as I am concerned, word games provide fun and mental stimulation all at the same time.