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Word games for the weary

Jumbling the letters of people`s names to produce humorous results has long been a pursuit of wordsmiths. Now the fever has hit ITWeb`s offices.
By Georgina Guedes, Contributor
Johannesburg, 17 Aug 2004

I am an anagram addict. The nine-letter word in The Star was for a long time the only reason that I purchased the paper. I`m not that keen on working out how many words I can find in the jumbled nine letters. Instead, my personal challenge is to see how long it takes me to figure out the complete word.

A friend of mine is more of a junkie than I am. Bryan Porter, editor of News24, and a guy who enjoys a good night out on the town, worked out an anagram of his name as "Reborn Party". My name, unfortunately, doesn`t lend itself to easy anagramation; it has too many Gs. The most amusing, if only partially representative, we have managed to come up with is "Aged Genius Ogre".

People who are really good at this game (I am not) take the names of famous people and try to convert them into alternatives that make some humorous or subversive comment about their personality. Alicia Silverstone becomes "Erotica Villainess", Florence Nightingale becomes, "Flit on, Cheering Angel" and George W Bush, president of the US, yields "the bigger power ends us".

While in the past, mystics used anagrams to reveal hidden meaning, these days they are seen more as an amusing joke.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

While in the past, mystics used anagrams to reveal hidden meaning, these days they are seen more as an amusing joke. In fact, the popularity of this word game among geeks like myself has led to the proliferation of sites like Andy`s Anagram Solver, which come up with various anagrams for any name a user cares to enter. I tried my hand at converting the names of my colleagues, and was delighted that this game of jumbling possesses no supernatural prescience, as some of the results were quite disastrous.

Carel Alberts, one time tech editor on ITWeb and now Brainstorm supplements editor, results in "Crabs be alert!" The meaning of this is unclear, but I have seen him do serious damage to seafood pasta.

Fay Humphries, ITWeb`s events programme director known for her direct approach to problems, became "as fiery humph". An alternative that I prefer is "fishy rum heap" which has no direct meaning, but sounds like the kind of insult that was being dolled out in cringe-inducing repartee in the movie Troy. Iain Scott, finance editor, becomes "T`is a tonic". They do say laughter is the best medicine...

Brainstorm art director, Sane Louw, sweetly rearranges into "a new soul", Tracy Burrows, ITWeb news editor becomes "acts worry rub", which could be a note on her conscientious nature. Editorial director Ranka Jovanovic becomes the nonsensical but hilarious "Jackaroo vin van", and our newly-appointed Brainstorm production co-ordinator, Cindy-Lee Minnaar becomes "any criminal ende", which is the most unlikely result of her diligence.

Entering our publisher Jovan Regasek on the site produces, after some encouragement "on Greek javas", a testimony to his predilection for coffee so thick you could stand a spoon in it.

Enough of that tomfoolery. This ogre`s signing off.

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