Stretching the mind is a good thing.?ÿ Making it fun helps.?ÿ I enjoy crossword puzzles and Sudoku solving almost daily.?ÿ My current little challenge is to identify words that meet the following requirement.?ÿ First, it must have an even number of letters.?ÿ Then, as you break the word into two-letter segments each segment contains one vowel and one consonant.?ÿ Examples:
4--hobo = ho + bo
6--banana = ba + na + na
8--measures = me + as +ur +es
10-- beneficial = be + ne + fi + ci + al
12 --alliterative = al + li + te + ra + ti + ve
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Many years ago I saw a story about the NBA star Jerry Lucas.?ÿ His thing was to take words or names and rearrange the letters in alphabetical order then attempt to pronounce the result.?ÿ His name became Ejrry Aclsu which he pronounced as Edge-ree Ack-ul-sue.?ÿ He did this daily with all sorts of words he saw or names he heard/saw.
HC, I need your email. To send you a bill. I get paid for that sort of thing!
😉
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I know a herbal cure for boredom if you like Pink Floyd. ?????ÿ
I used to do crosswords and sudoku when we got the newspaper. Would also do the anagram puzzle. Also have gone through some books of Sudoku at moderately high difficulty (ever do the ones with 5 squares each 9x9 but overlapped?).?ÿ Have been distracted by other things recently and not doing many such puzzles.
But I do not like exercises like your letter manipulations or many of those heard on the radio with puzzle master Will Shortz that require you to find correspondences between different types of words.?ÿ My brain just does not work that way.?ÿ I do better manipulating givens, rather than mentally searching the dictionary or famous names for some weird kind of match.
Like Jerry Lucas, I rearrange the letters in wdors
btu it's ton intentional.
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fyi
8 = immolate = im + mo + la + te
Another good one
10 = assimilate = as + si + mi + la + te
Ocassionally I do long, non-stop drives. The last one was almost 1700 miles. In order to stay awake I constantly compute percentages and fractions of overall distance and between various landmarks. I picked up the habit as a kid and probably couldn't stop now if I tried. I have learned to refrain from announcing results when my lovely bride is with me...
Oh, yeah.?ÿ Plenty of experience with that sort of thing.?ÿ Also, estimating my average speed on trips, which can vary a lot depending on how long I took off at the convenience store for gas, food and other vital needs.
As a youngster driving a tractor in a crop field?ÿ where I knew the length of the field, say one-quarter mile.?ÿ I would total up the miles I had driven since a certain time and try to visualize where I could have ended up if I had never turned around at the end of the field.
Reducing numbers to a single number, whatever it is called, is a standard challenge for me.?ÿ It all started with licenses plates that would be five digits long, say 14328.?ÿ The challenge was to see how quickly I could do that correctly and what shortcuts did I use.?ÿ In this case, the number reduces to 9.?ÿ I could add the numbers sequentially to get 18 then reduce that to 9.?ÿ But since you can toss out all nines and easy combinations that make nine the process can be shortened.?ÿ Here, I would ignore the 1 and 8 and only focus on the 432 which is a nine.?ÿ I still do this frequently when looking at a digital clock.
It must be nice to have brain power going to waste so you guys have to find these things to keep occupied.?ÿ I need all my mental horsepower just to do what I'm trying to get done.
@holy-cow FYI I think you are 10 = inebriated = in + eb + ri + at + ed
Good one.?ÿ No alcohol involved, though.?ÿ Crazy prescription medicine.
I'm with Bill on this.
Turn on the news, and try to figure out whose lying, and whose lying, but doesn't know it.... Now you have a puzzle!
😉
14 = organizational = or + ga + ni + za + ti + on + al
Anyone able to find a 16 or bigger?
Not words I use often, if at all, but some picked from a list of 16-letter words:
16 anathematization?ÿ?ÿ AN-AT-HE-MA-TI-ZA-TI-ON
16 acetylsalicylic ?ÿ AC-ET-YL-AS-AL-IC-YL-IC
16 demineralization?ÿ DE-MI-NE-RA-LI-ZA-TI-ON
16 denaturalization?ÿ DE-NA-TU-RA-LI-SA-TI-ON
16 hypocotyledonary?ÿ HY-PO-CO-TY-LE-DO-NA-RY
I have no idea what it means without looking it up, other than it obviously has to do with fungus.
18 hemibasidiomycetes?ÿ HE-MI-BA-SI-DI-OM-YC-ET-ES
and I've never heard this one either.
18 heterointoxication?ÿ HE-TE-RO-IN-TO-XI-CA-TI-ON
So I haven't found any commonly used ones, but they do exist in specialty fields.
I have heard of demineralization.?ÿ That's about it.?ÿ Thanks for checking into this.
Acetylsalicylic acid is aspirin.?ÿ
Wait.?ÿ Acetylsalicylic has 15 letters.?ÿ Bill has an extra A to make it 16.
Oops
