The Friday Fillip

Laws is an anagram of Slaw. So is awls. And that’s about it. Fascinating, huh?

Not really? Okay, then, how about this? Slaw is likely one of the few words that has no anagrams in the major European languages or Latin. (With the exception of Dutch — Wals, as in 1-2-3, 1-2-3, etc. — which is here deemed not to be a major European language.)

See how much innocent fun there is to be had by playing with anagrams? All of this and even more merriment is available free online, courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server. From which we learn that the Magna Carta becomes the Anagram Act, for example — just to throw in a little legal stuff to ease your withdrawal from the week’s work.

(Before we go any further, I have to say that for efficiency’s sake we need a symbol to indicate that something has been anagrammed into something else. For want of anything perfect, I suggest the upsidedown A symbol used in math: ∀)

Take my name, for example:

Simon Fodden ∀ Send Din Of Om (?an audio file attachment of Buddhists meditating?) and upwards of a thousand word groups that resist meaning. (Demon find so almost gets there.)

Other names work a lot better.

Connie Crosby ∀ Borneo cynics. It doesn’t get a whole lot better than that, I’d say. Bison once cry has some merit, and By soccer in on is frustratingly close to sense.

Simon Chester ∀ Hermetic sons, Chemises torn, Ostriches men, and many many more cogent turns.

(Clearly, this variation among the suitability of names for anagrams is something you’re going to want to consider if ever faced with the duty of naming a child.)

As you develop your anagrammatic muscles, you’ll be able to aspire to some of the more Olympian heights (∀ A polytheism nigh) achieved by the experts, a couple of which I’ll give you here to whet your appetite (∀ Whereat piety pout):

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. ∀ In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

[Vonnegut] Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe. ∀ A masquerade can cover a sense of what is real to deceive us; to be unjaded and not lost, we must, then, determine truth.