June 2022
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For relief after some heavy-duty math in May, in my June Diary I offered the following wordplay problem.
Brainteaser: Below are twenty pairs of syllables, each pair separated by a space. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to insert into each space a new syllable that makes a word out of the syllable to its left, and another word out of the syllable to its right.
So for the first pair, find a syllable xxx (not necessarily three letters) so that "Backxxx" is a word and "Xxxrobe" is also a word. It's harder than you'd think … but nowhere near as hard as last month's cake-cutting exercise.
1. Back ________ Robe
2. Bar ________ Der
3. Bor ________ Ive
4. Com ________ Ey
5. Cur ________ Ted
6. Door ________ Stone
7. Ex ________ Tive
8. Fire ________ Ways
9. Foot ________ Son
10. Fret ________ Mill
11. Ham ________ Tuce
12. Hand ________ Body
13. House ________ Man
14. Mis ________ Tain
15. Pre ________ Ence
16. Prow ________ Ence
17. Pur ________ Able
18. Sun ________ Tee
19. Tas ________ Rant
20. War ________ Well
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• Solution
1. Backward, Wardobe
2. Barren, Render
3. Border, Derive
4. Common, money
5. Curtain, Tainted
6. Doorkey, Keystone
7. Explain, Plaintive
8. Fireside, Sideways
9. Footstep, Stepson
10. Fretsaw, Sawmill
11. Hamlet, Lettuce
12. Handsome, Somebody
13. Housework, Workman (or Houseboat, Boatman)
14. Mischief, Chieftain
15. Present, Sentence
16. Prowess, Essence
17. Pursuit, Suitable (or Purport, Portable)
18. Sunset, Settee
19. Tasty, Tyrant
20. Warfare, Farewell
[I lifted this from Willard R. Espy's Almanac of Words at Play — still, after fifty years, one of the best wordplay collections. This is Espy's entry for November 15th.]