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Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

A Way with Words, a radio show and podcast about language and linguistics.

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Math quiz
Lee Daniel Crocker
1 Posts
(Offline)
1
2012/12/17 - 5:43am

In John's math quiz, the second question was "Counting up, what's the first number that is an English word spelled backward." You answered "ten", which spells "net". Any scrabble player could tell you the answer is "six", "xis" being the plural of the Greek letter.

Guest
2
2012/12/17 - 9:11am

Not to mention another one between six and ten: seven. Neve may not be as common as xi, but it is still a word. Owt shows up as a dialect word for anything, a variant of aught, but I can see skipping that one.

Guest
3
2012/12/17 - 9:18am

And I hope nobody tries to say that xi or neve aren't English words, just because they didn't arrive via Old English. Such a person would have a very odd definition of English vocabulary indeed.

Guest
4
2012/12/18 - 2:12am

Some bloke says, or maybe invents it just for the naked purpose of like games, that eno is slang for 'cool, awesome.'
Allowing 2 words and negative numbers, 'eno Sunim' means 'cool Korean monk.'
I do would like to hear whether eno is a real word or fake ?

Ron Draney
721 Posts
(Offline)
5
2012/12/18 - 10:43pm

Glenn said

And I hope nobody tries to say that xi or neve aren't English words, just because they didn't arrive via Old English. Such a person would have a very odd definition of English vocabulary indeed.

No, that's not the problem. It's just that John specifically said that the reversed word had to be non-plural.

Guest
6
2012/12/19 - 12:01pm

The solution to the puzzle also has to be an English word. So I guess that eliminates OREZ   (which I just discovered is Romanian for "rice").

That rule also eliminates ENO SUNIM, RobertB, but it was a clever suggestion. Using my favorite acronym finder, I was able to verify that ENO is used for at least 42 things. But where the connotation of "cool" comes from I have no idea.

 

Guest
7
2012/12/19 - 12:54pm

Well, if we restrict comments strictly to the puzzle, we would have missed a lot. The puzzle said "counting up" and that eliminates non-positive integers and all non-integers.

Come to think of it, I do use fractions when playing hide-and-seek with my granddaughters. Nine. Nine and a half. Nine and two thirds. Nine and three fours. Nine and four fifths. Eventually they yell at me and I know just where they are.

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