Eureka!

by Walker Royce

  41. Ambiguous-pester

  42. Sage Alarmer

  43. Troika Dorothy’saunt

  44. Notquite Evening-gman-ourstar

  45. Bullseye

  46. Precision

  47. Lookout Spices

  48. Peterbilt-Sunrise-chevy

  49. Mystics Column-stag

  50. Termite-stoned-ma’am Shrub

  PUZZLE 47: RASH ANIMATED CHARACTERS

  Example: Max-ankle Rodent = Min (antonym of max) Knee (relative of ankle, homonym of “nie”) Mouse (synonym of rodent)

  1. Greenshade Lubricant

  2. Haze-antler Segment-noisemaker

  3. Oak-him Brownie

  4. Who-meadow Sly-hay-polo

  5. Silo-joint Massage-steer

  6. Darling Fowl

  7. Glitch-tern-kisser

  8. Child’swound

  9. Snorkle–Paid

  10. Turkey-meadow Coif-left

  11. Could-golfprop Estuary

  12. Dinger Prawn-star

  13. Free-look SUV–Fur

  14. Scream

  15. Brutal-re Dopeslap Chateau

  16. She-either

  17. Money-via the Aloof Spirit

  18. Canyon of a Forest

  19. Guzzle-tail Smith

  20. Howitzer Coffee

  21. Color-you, Coif-us or John-I

  22. Seethrough Felon

  23. Touch-formerspouse the Kitty

  24. Auto-pasture

  25. Over-rover

  26. Ms. Pa-gunk

  27. Rare Pot-here

  28. Yellowstone Congruent

  29. Hitchhike-each

  30. Energetic Re-bench

  31. Annoy or Hyde

  32. Badger-digout Mutt

  33. Lumber-bond

  34. Bothers Roll-previouslyknownas

  35. Kentucky Formalwear

  36. Stupid-boyfriend

  37. Chasm Prop-daughter

  38. Maid-the-duchess

  39. Scuttlebutt Dark-annum

  40. A Dog out the Chapeau

  41. Wondering Canyon

  42. Foolish Avoid

  43. Hooter-Ethel She. Understood-max

  44. Parsley-ernie

  45. Dinero-podmember

  46. Interference Black

  47. Enormous All Derriere

  48. Cow-sparkle

  49. Fiddle-chime

  50. Venus

  GAMES AND OTHER MENTAL EXERCISES

  The remainder of this appendix introduces some other stimulating mental exercise for improving your observation skills and enjoying the English language.

  Crossword Puzzles

  Boredom brought me to crossword puzzles. In the 1980s, I traveled more and more on business, enduring long and longer flights. Before laptop computers, a 5-hour coast-to-coast or 10- hour international flight was lots of time to kill. After I read the newspaper cover to cover, all that was left to consume time was that crossword puzzle, begging to be tested. I must have tried 20 puzzles before I finally finished one. It seemed quite difficult, but I did persevere. I learned that if I’d put a puzzle down for a while; when I picked it up again later, I’d inevitably make more progress. I just had to clear my mind and see it from a fresh perspective.

  Although there are numerous crossword puzzle authors, Will Shortz of The New York Times is my favorite crossword editor. His puzzles are not the hardest, the funniest, the most error-free, the cheapest, or the most available. But for my taste, he’s the best, simply because his style seems incredibly fair, entertaining, and consistent. The Times puzzles progress in difficulty as the week progresses, easiest on Mondays and most difficult on Saturday. On Sundays there is a larger special themed puzzle that is usually Thursday-ish in difficulty.

  Over three decades and 4 million air miles, I have become good at crosswords. Not great, but good enough. I can almost always solve The Times puzzles completely, although sometimes it takes me a few hours and an occasional search on the internet for that one critical answer, usually some entertainment-oriented question (my weakness). Saturday and Sunday puzzles are the ones I look forward to enjoying with my wife.

  Although doing a crossword puzzle alone is fun, doing one with a friend or spouse can be even more rewarding. Puzzles offer great mental exercise, and reasoning out loud with someone else can be a real eye-opener. There is no better example of the power of diverse thinking than working through a puzzle together and observing how your thought patterns differ. My wife and I have learned an immense amount about each other by reasoning through crossword puzzles on long drives, airplane flights, and snowy Sunday afternoons. These incredibly rich communications sessions have helped us understand each other’s perspectives, outlooks, reasoning patterns, and priorities. No kidding. Try it.

  SCRABBLE®

  Scrabble® provides some of the best mental exercise there is. Although many online sites offer Scrabble®, the board game between two people is still the best way to play. Scrabble® is up there with chess and bridge as one of the three classic games of skill. I played Scrabble® extensively when I was younger; I have probably played monthly for the past 20 years as an entertaining diversion. Scrabble® experts, the world-class tournament players, are nuts. Some of them spend almost every waking hour categorizing words and organizing Scrabble® inventories in their memories. They study dictionaries and word forms. They exercise their mental abilities by anagramming words endlessly.

  A Scrabble® expert will outscore an amateur every time, regardless of the lousy tiles he picks out of the bag. Several good books provide important word lists, basic strategies, and more complete advice. Here are a few pointers for the average person who is just starting to play Scrabble®. This advice will probably improve your average score by 50 to 100 points per game.

  Two-letter words are the primary connectors for high-scoring words. Memorize all 101 of the two-letter words in The Official SCRABBLE® Players Dictionary.

  Never use a blank tile unless you are making a high-scoring play (50 points or more). Blanks are the most flexible tiles in the bag. They significantly improve your chances of making high-scoring plays, especially plays using all seven letters in your rack (called a bingo).

  Never use an S tile unless you are making a high-scoring play (30 points or more). S tiles give you tremendous flexibility to add to an existing word and use all seven letters in your rack. If you can’t score 30 points, make a play worth less and save the S tile for your next play.

  If making the highest scoring play in your hand leaves you with tiles that are difficult to use in forming new words (for example, five vowels, or 3 Gs, or 4 Ts), consider making a lower scoring play that leaves you with a more flexible rack of tiles for your next turn.

  H is one of the most valuable scoring tiles. It is a very common letter in the English language, and there are 10 two-letter words with H that make it easy to use. Note that H is worth four points, but it occurs just as frequently as many of the one-point letters (see Figure 1-1).

  U is one of the least valuable tiles unless you also have a Q, in which case it becomes invaluable. The U is difficult to play and score well. Although U is worth only one point, it occurs as infrequently as many of the higher count letters. (Again, see Figure 1-1.)

  Learn the obscure but important three-letter and four-letter words that use the high-scoring tiles: J, K, Q, X, and Z. These are some good ones to remember: J: raj, taj, jeu

  K: auk, koi, khi, kay, kex

  Q: qua, quay, qaid, qat

  X: cox, dex, lux, oxo, oxy, pyx, xis

  Z: adz, adze, biz, coz, fez, wiz, zoa, zoon, zee, zed, zax, zek

  With just these tips, you will be amazed at how much more fun you will have and how much more competitive you will be playing Scrabble®. You must work on three other things to become an advanced player: anagramming, reading the board for scoring opportunities and placement, and vocabulary and word knowledge. Most of these skills come from playing and practicing and from daily mental exercise, not from studying.


  Capable Scrabble® players should have fun solving the next puzzle. See if you can determine the significance of the following short paragraph.

  PUZZLE 48. Scrabble® PERTINENCE

  This “joked hoax” paragraph is crazy. A young informed novice will be able to determine a unique virtue of its elegant words.

  Once you solve this puzzle, try to create your version. I predict you will find this task challenging. I did.

  Word Mastermind

  When I was in high school, my best friend and I played a one-on-one thinking game that was simple to explain but required tremendous skills in deduction and word forming. It provided great mental exercise and could be played anywhere with just a pencil and paper. Here are the rules.

  Object: Guess the opponent’s five-letter word in the fewest number of turns.

  Setup: Each player thinks of a five-letter word and writes it at the top of a piece of paper, folding the top of the page down to conceal it.

  Play:

  Player 1 states any five-letter word as a guess at Player 2’s hidden word.

  Player 2 determines the hits and announces a two-digit assessment. The first digit corresponds to the total number of shared letters. The second digit identifies how many of those letters are in the right place. For example: if Player 1’s word is crypt and Player 2 guessed party, the hit assessment would be 4-0 (4 shared letters and none of them in the right spot).

  Player 2 then makes a guess at Player 1’s word, and Player 1 determines the hits and announces the two-digit assessment.

  Players must make accurate assessments. A player who makes an inaccurate assessment forfeits the game.

  Play alternates back and forth until one player guesses the exact word (a hit assessment of 5-5). The player who guesses the opponent’s word in the fewest turns wins.

  An example game is shown at the top of the next page.

  This game is addicting and much more a battle of wits than it seems at first glance. The English language has jillions of five-letter words, so the possibilities are endless. Logical thinking plays an important role in this game. Good players can almost always guess the word in seven or fewer turns. It sometimes helps to write out the alphabet at the top of your paper so that you can visualize the letters, cross out the ones you have eliminated, and reason through the remaining possibilities.

  Dictionary

  My parents taught us a great game when I was young that has been morphed into the popular commercial board game Balderdash. The original version that I learned is equally fun and requires no equipment other than a dictionary and some paper and pencils. It provides excellent mental exercise, and it builds communications skills in some interesting ways.

  Rules: The game Dictionary can be played with 4 to 10 people. The object is to achieve a certain number of points. With 4 to 7 people, the first player who scores 10 points wins. With 8 to 10 people, the first one player who scores 5 points wins. You can define the threshold for winning at any level, or confine the game to two or three rounds for each player based on the time available.

  A game consists of multiple rounds. In each round, one player acts in the role of dictionary master. The dictionary master rotates clockwise among the players from round to round. Each player is given a pad of paper to write down definitions. It is important that each player’s pad of paper look exactly the same so that when multiple definitions are read from these papers, no one can tell who the author was.

  The dictionary master looks through the dictionary, selects an obscure word, and announces that word to the other players. The master writes down the word and its primary definition in a concise form on a piece of paper. The definition can be paraphrased, as long as the essence of the definition is conserved. Each of the other players writes down the word and their proposed definition, and gives their pad to the dictionary master. It is important to write legibly.

  The dictionary master puts the definitions in random order and reads them all aloud. The dictionary master then asks each player, starting with the player to the left, which definition is correct. Each player must commit to one definition. Once every player has committed, the dictionary master announces the correct definition and tabulates player’s scores as follows:

  A player earns 1 point for selecting the correct definition.

  Players earn 1 point for every player who selects their proposed definition. (Exception: A player can select their own definition to bluff or influence others, but cannot earn a point for selecting it.)

  The dictionary master earns 2 points if no player selects the correct definition.

  Strategy: For the dictionary master, the key is to find a word that is counterintuitive to its word formation, sound, or structure (prefix, suffix, root, and so on). For the players, the key is to create a credible definition based on their knowledge of roots, prefixes, suffixes, sounds, syllables, and the general feel of the word provided.

  It is critical for players to get outside their realm of comfort. A known sports expert is likely to be associated with having created sports-oriented definitions, a science teacher with science-oriented definitions, and a professional nurse with medical terms. So this game is inherently a game of competing communications. A lot of bluffing and a lot of reasoning are involved. It is a great group game that allows people to open up in exercising their communications skills.

  Fun Thought Problems and Brain Teasers

  Some problems are best solved with a paper and pencil, some with a computer, some with a long analysis. There are also great problems that are more fun to solve in your head. These are appropriate for playing while driving, running, or camping, where you have no facilities but the use of your brain. A key aspect of these problems is that they must have a simple perspective that makes the problem solvable without any tools. Here is a good one that came from a timed Mathematics Association of America test that we took in high school.

  PUZZLE 49. SUM FUN

  What is the sum of the numbers from 1 to 1000?

  If you look at this the right way, the solution is easy to reason through in your head.

  Here is a more complex puzzle to noodle over. It forces you to reason about an infinite sequence. This is hard for most people, but the answer is easy to see if you look at it from the right perspective.

  PUZZLE 50. PERCENTAGE POSER

  What percentage of positive integers is represented with at least one 7? See if you can come within 5% just by reasoning in your head. Then work the solution out on paper.

  The next brain teaser will not be solvable in your head unless you are truly a genius. Feel free to use paper and pencil. This one is a classic.

  PUZZLE 51. THE GENIUS

  Ralph meets his old high school classmate Norton at a Mensa party. Norton greets Ralph: “I didn’t know you were a genius. See if you can pass my genius test.”

  Norton: “I am going to tell you some facts about my three sons. As soon as you know their ages, stop me. The sum of their ages is 13. The product of their ages is your age. My eldest son weighs 81 pounds.”

  Ralph: “Stop. I know their ages.”

  Norton: “You must be a genius. You stopped me at exactly the right time.”

  Can you determine the ages of Norton’s sons from the information given? There is a unique answer of three integers. No fractions are involved.

  Puzzle Hints

  The hints that follow should help you get started with many of the puzzles. For additional puzzle-solving hints, go to walkerroyce.com. Search for Puzzle 52 somewhere on that site.

  Puzzle 1: Observations of an orthopedic surgeon

  Count the number of words (hyphenated words count as only 1) and ask yourself how that could relate to the text.

  Puzzle 2: Vowel blends

  Try to think through 3- and 4-letter words that could begin or end with the digraphs. AA and UU require 6-letter words, II requires 5 letters, and the rest can be done in 4 letters or less. There are better answers, but the words are pretty obscure.

 
Puzzle 3: Consonant blends

  My solution required one 8-letter word (HH), four 6-letter words (DF, GP, KK, WW), seven 5-letter words, five 4-letter words, and eight 3-letter words.

  Puzzle 4: Letter sequences

  No hint.

  Puzzle 5: First impressions

  Same hint as Puzzle 1.

  Puzzle 6: A questionable preoccupation with vocabularies

  As you read the text, notice how much your glottis is used in an unpressured way. If that doesn’t help, read the chapter on English as a Romance language.

  Puzzle 7: Word safari

  Most of the animals in this puzzle are well known, but there are several obscure 3-letter words that are animals. A web-search for 3-letter Scrabble® words should help you identify many of the lesser known animals.

  Puzzle 8: Word geography

  This puzzle is challenging, but searching for the most populous cities in some of the less populated states is a good way to uncover a few of the obscure city names.

  Puzzle 9: Symbol hunt

  A web-based search of keyboard symbols may help. Also, realize that many of the letter keys and number keys can be represented by words (e.g., be, bee, see, won, etc.)

  Puzzle 10: Anagram trivia

  Part 1: No additional hints.

  Part 2: There are two vowels and one consonant.

  Part 3: There are two consonants and one vowel.

  Puzzle 11: Postal abbreviation words

  Start by finding SD, MT, NH, MD, NM, and TN. Once you have marked off those words (and there is only one possibility for each), the rest should be straightforward.

  Puzzle 12: Could Jefferson write?

  I am a ‘FIERCE PUNSTER’ and you can anagram those letters into two of the words in the preamble that are the instances of abuse.

  Eureka Puzzle Hints