Weekly Wordplay

May 30–June 3

I have a hinky pinky (a two-word rhyming phrase in which each word has two syllables like “brighter writer” or “vinyl final”) for wisdom that many of the seniors will begin to acquire this fall. Turn in your correct guess to earn the extra credit.

May 23–27

This image represents something you may have seen if you attended Sunday’s banquet. To earn the extra credit, figure out what it is and turn in your answer.

May 9–13

English (and all the other languages I know anything about) have idioms—phrases that can’t be understood just be by learning what the individual words mean. To earn the extra credit, create a video or picture that illustrates an English idiom. As an example, try to guess what idiom is illustrated by this video.

May 2–6

The letters A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are used to name the musical notes. What is the longest word you can create using only those letters?

Create a word of at least six letters to earn the extra credit.

Note: A quick Google search reveals that other people besides me have wondered about the same question and posted many answers on the internet. You could look up how other people solved this puzzle, but that, of course, would be against the spirit of this challenge.

April 25–29

SHARP to TUNED word ladder

Music tour begins this week! During your performances, if your voice or instrument is ever SHARP, I hope you quickly get it TUNED. Beginning with the word SHARP, change one letter at a time—always forming a valid word each time you change a letter—until you form the word TUNED.

Example: DOG to CAT

DOG > DOT > COT > CAT

April 18–22

April 11–15

Mini Crossword

Solve this crossword to earn the extra credit. Printed copies are available in the English classroom.

April 4–8

AWAY to BACK word ladder

I’m AWAY on the senior class trip most of this week, but I’ll be BACK on Friday. Beginning with the word AWAY, change one letter at a time—always forming a valid word each time you change a letter—until you form the word BACK.

Example: DOG to CAT

DOG > DOT > COT > CAT

March 29–April 1

Travel to these latitude and longitude coordinates and find a hidden message:
41°17'04.9" N 72°15'53.3" W
31°11'00.0" N 121°26'13.9" E
38°32'21.6" N 0°08'43.5" W
41°28'18.5" N 87°21'27.1" W
45°37'32.0" N 122°38'21.4" W
41°56'13.7" N 87°49'57.0" W
52°05'56.0" N 5°13'24.5" E
38°32'21.6" N 0°08'43.5" W
13°45'15.4" N 100°29'41.9" E
41°28'18.5" N 87°21'27.1" W
45°37'32.0" N 122°38'21.4" W
41°57'49.1" N 87°39'45.8" W
41°28'18.5" N 87°21'27.1" W

March 14–18

Consider the word “spork.” It’s a utensil that’s a combination of a spoon and a fork, and the word for it is a combination of the word “spoon” and the word “fork.”

This sort of word, formed by blending parts of two separate words together, is called a “portmanteau.” Lewis Carrol came up with the term writing about his poem “Jabberwocky:”

“You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

A portmanteau was a sort of suitcase that opened into two separate halves:

Here are some more examples:

infomercial = information + commercial
Brexit = Britain + exit
Billary = Bill + Hillary (Clinton)
Brangelina = Brad Pitt + Angelina Jolie
labradoodle = labrador + poodle
liger = lion + tiger
Tanzania = Tanganyika + Zanzibar (I learned this one while writing this week’s wordplay.)

To earn the extra credit, create a new portmanteau that you find useful. Explain the two words that make up the portmanteau and use it in an example sentence.

March 7–11

These images represent four PAA students. To earn the extra credit, figure out which four.

February 28—March 4

To earn this week’s extra credit, figure out what phrase this image represents.

February 21-25

To earn the extra credit, explain what these eight odd phrases have in common:

nocturnal lidocaine
radical elf
neutral Lebanon
signature baseball
mocha onion
unveil Yakima
Pakistani language
power DNA

February 14–18

The New Yorker publishes a trivia game each weekday called Name Drop. Players are given six clues that point to a notable person. The clues are increasingly helpful; the first one gives relatively obscure information about the person, and a player who doesn’t know who the person is after reading the sixth clue likely doesn’t know much about the person in question at all. Try a few recent examples:

February 11
February 7
January 19
January 7
January 5
January 4
December 29

To earn the extra credit, write a name drop puzzle of your own. Choose a person that PAA students could be reasonably expected to know about. Write six clues of increasing helpfulness that point to the person. It should be quite impressive for someone to know the person after the first clue, but the sixth should almost give away the answer.

We’ll play the best ones in class next week.

February 7–11

LONG to SNIP word ladder

Several students have been rocking great haircuts recently. Beginning with the word LONG, change one letter at a time—always forming a valid word each time you change a letter—until you form the word SNIP.

Example: DOG to CAT

DOG > DOT > COT > CAT

January 31–February 4

Which sounds right?

1. Mr. Rasmussen has a small gray poodle.

2. Mr. Rasmussen has a gray small poodle.

For most English speakers, the first one sounds natural, and the second sounds odd.

An awesome new Mexican restaurant might sound like someplace you want to try. But a Mexican new awesome restaurant sounds bizarre.

Why?

According to linguists, there is a rule about the order of adjectives in English. People who grow up speaking English are rarely taught the rule and just use it naturally. But in some languages, natural-sounding adjective order isn’t so strict, so people learning English are sometimes taught that adjectives sound natural in an order something like this: number, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose, and then the noun the adjectives apply to.

For example, imagine three lovely big old square green Italian stucco rental houses.

Number—three
Opinion—lovely
Size—big
Age—old
Shape—square
Color—green
Origin—Italian
Material—stucco
Purpose—rental
Noun—houses

Change the order of those adjectives too much, and things would start to sound weird.

To earn the extra credit, think of an exception to this rule. Find a situation in which the usual adjective order given above results in something that sounds odd, and a different adjective order is the one that sounds natural.

For example, the villain from “Little Red Riding Hood” is usually called the Big Bad Wolf. That’s size, opinion, noun. The rule described above suggests that opinion should come before size, resulting in a Bad Big Wolf. But that just doesn’t sound right, does it?

January 24-28

Most of you have played the game Hink Pink with me, in which you are given a clue and need to find the two-word rhyming phrase that answers the clue.

Example: I have a hink pink for an overweight feline.

Answer: fat cat

If we extend that idea to a three-word rhyming phrase, we might get something like this:

Example: I have a hink pink bink for headwear worn by an overweight feline.

Answer: fat cat hat

To earn the extra credit, come up with a clue and a three-word rhyming phrase that answers the clue. Additional requirement: It needs to relate to something you’ve studied in one of your classes so far this school year. For example, English III has read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, so someone in that class might write this:

Clue: A dull series about an American writer known for his creepy poems

Answer: slow Poe show

January 17-21

To earn this week’s extra credit, figure out what common phrase this image represents.

January 10–14

There is a currently popular online word game called Wordle. Have you seen people sharing images like this one?

🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨🟨
⬜🟩🟩🟨⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

They show how someone did on the Wordle puzzle for the day. To earn the extra credit, visit https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday of this week. After you solve the puzzle or use up your six tries, click the share button and post your result on the “Q2W9 Weekly Wordplay” assignment on Google Classroom.

January 3-7

Several language-related organizations choose a “word of the year.” Sometimes it’s a word that was particularly important during the year, one heard frequently, or one that the organization feels sums up the year. For example, as the 2021 word of the year, Oxford University Press chose “vax” and Dictionary.com chose “allyship.”

To earn the extra credit for this week, reflect on 2021, choose a word for your year, and explain why you chose it.

December 13–17

This is a picture of Mr. Rasmussen’s freezer door. What word, commonly heard during this time of year, does it represent?

December 6–10

Fourteen PAA student names are hidden in the word search puzzle below. Finding them can help you discover the nine-letter Christmas-related word that is the answer to this week’s wordplay. Figure out what that word is and turn it in to earn the extra credit.

November 29–December 3

Solve the cryptogram below. Each letter in the original quote has been consistently replaced with another letter of the alphabet. Hint: D = W

JQH NK DNXUVGKH, JQH UNTOVKH, JQH ZJGGKH VNKA FP QJAK: "QTD, HJUNKS! QTD, HJQZKS! QTD, MSJQZKS JQH YXWKQ! TQ, ZTAKV! TQ, ZOMXH! TQ, HTQHKS JQH FGXVEKQ! VT VNK VTM TR VNK MTSZN! VT VNK VTM TR VNK DJGG! QTD HJUN JDJP! HJUN JDJP! HJUN JDJP JGG!"

November 15-19

BIRD to FOOD word ladder

Beginning with the word BIRD, change one letter at a time—always forming a valid word each time you change a letter—until you form the word FOOD.

Example: DOG to CAT

DOG > DOT > COT > CAT

November 8-12:

A very short summary of the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, has a hard time deciding whether to kill his uncle, who has murdered Hamlet’s father and married Hamlet’s mother.

A very short summary of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs & Ham: Sam-I-Am persistently tries to persuade a reluctant companion to try an oddly colored dish.

Notice how the title Green Eggs & Ham ends the same way that Hamlet begins. We can squish them together and get Green Eggs & Hamlet. If we imagine the two stories were actually combined into Green Eggs & Hamlet, a summary might go something like this: The Prince of Denmark has a tough choice: try some oddly colored food as Sam-I-Am keeps urging, or kill him.

Each of the following three plot summaries is a mash-up of two well-known stories whose titles can be combined like the Green Eggs & Hamlet example above. To earn the extra credit, give the three combined titles that would fit the three combined plots.

1. A princess described as the “fairest of them all” escapes the plots of her evil stepmother and is protected by seven miniature Siberian husky-wolf hybrids in the Yukon.

2. A horse endures many hardships—including imprisonment in the enchanted castle of a prince who’s been transformed into a hideous monster—but eventually retires happily in the countryside.

3. The protagonist retrieves a golden orb that his Uncle Miraz lost and becomes the first amphibian ruler of Narnia.

Hint: One of the stories in each pair is a classic fairytale.

November 1-5:

Out of all the first names of students at PAA, these names share a property that the others do not:

Barrett
Breasa
Johnny
Saber

To earn the extra credit, explain what uncommon property they share.

Hint 1: Access to an electronic device will make it easier to notice the property.

Hint 2: The four names that share this property can be further divided into two categories. Johnny’s name is the only one in its category, so it has a unique property that no other PAA name has.

October 25-29:

In the musical My Fair Lady, the character Eliza Doolittle speaks with a Cockney accent, of which the character Henry Higgins tries to “cure” her. Watch this video to see how Eliza pronounces the sentence “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” and how Henry is trying to get her to say it.

The sentence is constructed so that it is dense with instances of a particular vowel sound: rain, Spain, stays, mainly, and plain all have the same vowel sound. Several of them rhyme too, but that is beside the point here. When a writer or speaker intentionally puts several syllables with the same vowel sound close enough together that the repeated sounds are noticeable, it’s called assonance. Writers use it for the same sorts of reasons they might use rhyme or alliteration—it often sounds cool and can make the writing more memorable.

Henry Higgins’ sentence demonstrates assonance, but not really because he wanted it to sound a certain way. He just wanted to give Eliza a sentence with a bunch of that particular vowel sound to practice, and that created a sentence with a lot of assonance. Five out of the nine words assonate—more than half.

To earn the extra credit, write an original sentence that’s something like the one from My Fair Lady. It needs to be at least seven words long, and at least half of the words need to assonate.

October 18-22:

To earn the extra credit, tell what word is depicted below. It is a place that every PAA student has been before.

October 11-15:

A riddle: We are two common ingredients in fruit-based drinks. The menu at Tea Bar includes drinks that prominently feature both of us. If you start with either of our names and swap the positions of two letters, you end up with the name of the other. What are we?

To earn the extra credit, give the two words that answer the riddle above.

October 4-8:

Consider the pairs of letters that make up the postal abbreviations for the US States: CA for California, OR for Oregon, NV for Nevada, etc. Several common eight-letter words can be formed by combining those two-letter postal abbreviations. For example, ME (Maine) + MO (Missouri) + RI (Rhode Island) + AL (Alabama) = MEMORIAL.

Using only the initials of PAA students and staff, what is the longest word you can form? If you can find a word of six letters, you’ll earn the extra credit, but even longer ones will earn you glory.

To earn the extra credit, turn in a list of students and staff whose initials you used and the word you formed. Example: Jason Eyer, Tanner Sitanggang—JETS

September 27–October 1:

Complete this word spiral puzzle.

September 20-24:

September 13-17:

Solve the cryptogram below. Each letter in the original quote has been consistently replaced with another letter of the alphabet. Hint: Q = I

QR TFY ZFYNK SFI UG RFBHFIIGS JA AFFS JA TFY JBG KGJK JSK BFIIGS, GQIEGB ZBQIG IEQSHA ZFBIE BGJKQSH, FB KF IEQSHA ZFBIE IEG ZBQIQSH.
—UGSVJOQS RBJSPNQS

September 6–10:

August 30–September 3:

To earn the extra credit, explain what the six odd phrases below have in common and give another phrase that could be added to the list.

NINJA BEATS OMEN
AMAZE BEARS
KITTEN OATH
SANE LLAMA RACES
CLEAR DIAMONDS
A SEVENTH SEVEN

 August 23–27:

SMOKY to CLEAR word ladder

Beginning with the word SMOKY, change one letter at a time—always forming a valid word each time you change a letter—until you form the word CLEAR.

Example: DOG to CAT

DOG > DOT > COT > CAT

Note: for the purposes of this challenge a “valid word” will mean any combination of letters for which you can find a preexisting usage example. Acronyms? Sure. Abbreviations? Ok. Unusual slang words? Fine. But if you think I might question whether anyone has ever used a particular combination of letters together before, give me a source.