What games first made you realize that words and letters make great playthings? Martha describes puzzling, as a child, over the odd combination of letters, F-U-N-E-X, until she finally figured out the joke. Grant talks about discovering anagrams as a youngster, and how word puzzles in the newspaper became a daily ritual. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Games with Words and Letters”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
When I was very young, I happened across a copy of Reader’s Digest, and I saw something absolutely mystifying. On two facing pages, there were all these little line drawings, and under all those were these seemingly unrelated capital letters separated by spaces. The first row of letters read F-U-N-E-X. Fun X, Fun X, what in the world? And right above those letters was a line drawing of a little old man sitting in a restaurant talking to the waiter. But what was the connection?
I puzzled over this for a long time, and then I finally realized that if you sound out those letters individually, and if you sound like a little old man, then F-U-N-E-X is… F-U-N-E-X? The guy wanted breakfast. Have you any eggs? Have you any eggs? And it goes on and on like that. The guy finally orders MNX. MNX. MNX. Very good. Yeah, he wasn’t keeping kosher.
And Grant, it was one of the first inklings I ever had that you can really play with language. I had something like that. There was an algebra teacher who had a board in the front of the room that was one of those cloth boards with like the ridges on it, like big corduroy. Yeah, yeah. And you’d take these white plastic letters and she would spell out, say, the assignments for the week or the schedule of the things that we were going to do or just some happy message for the day or for the season.
And she was sometimes late coming to class, and so we would occupy ourselves for a few minutes. And I took it upon myself to rearrange those letters. Now, I didn’t know what an anagram was. I mean, I’m like 12 or 13, right? I had no idea what an anagram was. And so I had like these three minutes where I, as fast as possible, had to rearrange these letters to spell something else. And I would try to do it differently every day.
And, of course, she would come in and rearrange it back and never really knew that I was responsible. But that was the first time I knew what anagramming was. I had no idea until then. And so I was a paper boy. Did you know that? No, I didn’t know that. Yeah, and there were puzzles in the Mexico ledger. This is Mexico, Missouri, every week. And I would solve those in the 15 minutes that it took me to fold all my newspapers and shove them in my canvas bag before I rode off on my bicycle to throw them on the lawns and porches.
And those puzzles were a similar kind of experience. Like, wait, somebody is out there making puzzles for me to solve? You know, it was the cryptograms and the word searches. Jumble. Did you do jumble? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. But the thing was like it was a constrained environment. I only had enough time to solve it until I could fold the newspapers because I didn’t have a paper to keep for myself. So if I didn’t solve it, I was done. I was never going to know what the answer was.
So it was both of those environments. It’s about like rushing on deadline to solve puzzles. And that was the start of it for me. Just the idea that like you’re challenging yourself against another person or against some kind of time constraint. And winning sometimes, losing sometimes, but enjoying it the whole time.
Well, hey, was there a word puzzle that sparked your interest in language? Let us know. Call us at 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.
