Puzzles and Words

By David Astle

A quirky dictionary and puzzle book in one pocket-sized volumeWord nerds and puzzle nuts welcome: this is a book to keep your mind tickled. With more than 400 word stories and 160 original brainteasers, this collection has something to keep all ages amused for hours. From agenda to zumba, it explains how words came to be, and it also offers puzzles such as anagram challenges, riddles, rhymes, and brain teasers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781743431399

Book preview

Over 170 new puzzles and

200 word stories

DAVID ASTLE

First published in 2012

Copyright © David Astle 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Fairfax Books, an imprint of

Allen & Unwin

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 103 5

Internal design by Kirby Stalgis

Set in 11/14.5 Avenir Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For the viewers and the solvers

CONTENTS

Introduction

Rise and fall

Current gossip

Turn, turn, turn

Stripteaser

Elementary school

Positively not

Ease the squeeze

All-star cast

Daily grind

Back of beyond

Animated speech

Bugalugs

Just not right

Queue spotlight

Japanese boxes

Regional religion

Nature calls

Words and music

Zeal the deal

Exotic locals

Verbal stretch

Bunch of five

Freshly baked

Hard luck.

Hooray for Hobson

Gram designs

Scams and schemes

Dinky sitcom

Master keys

Centre of attention

Snap decisions

Pick your own

Musical mouthful

Inside, across and down

Out of shape

Showtalk

How the other half lives

Choo-choo news

Gumption

Neo-logs

Uncommon code

Bone up

Where was I?

Idiom ahoy

Family secrets

Kiwiology

Meeting of minds

Spiderwoman

Google agogo

Vice verse

Nomadic N

Babes in army

Takeaway message

Chequered past

Haven’t we met?

Jack Russell ♥ Fifi

Mountweazel words

Now you see it

Landscape pitcher

Offbeat audio

High life

Vulgar mob

Segar box

Uncooperative

Boganville

Three sisters

En garde

They, robots

Get-together

Yours initially

Handy to know

Mr Fabulous

Trench language

Backstreet boy

Bigger phish to phry

Board meeting

Hazy definitions

Holus bolus

Out-box office

Spreadsheet

Solutions

INTRODUCTION

Within these pages lurk moofers and splogs, fuds and fids, Parwill and vishing: strange words you have probably never met before. Then there are familiar words with peculiar stories, like dugong and Google, manure and peculiar.

You’ll also meet Miss Muffet and Billy Blanks, and get to dabble in fencing and a game called oichokabu. And that’s just a few nibbles of the 200-plus stories inside, covering everything from abracadabra to zzxjoanw (a Maori drum that doesn’t exist).

As a bonus, every dip into the dictionary comes with a set of puzzles related to the topic. So the Full Monty story is followed by a movie riddle and a striptease anagram. Or after a page of sailor slang, you get to splice words like old-time rigging.

To help you navigate, each puzzle is graded from one hourglass (breezy) to three (brain-busting), while this symbol suggests a bit of both. The Macquarie Dictionary serves as umpire when it comes to what words are okay. It’s also important to note that some puzzles, often those involving puns or word chases, may well have more than one solution.

Answers are in the back, if you can’t resist peeking. To borrow from Miss Hoover of The Simpsons (page 22), have a cromulent time with Puzzles and Words.

RISE AND FALL

Let’s toy with two toys that both rely on blocks. The first is a global craze that goes by the name of LEGO. At some stage, every kid has played with these tiny bricks, building a city, a fairy palace, a pirate ship. Each vivid plastic block has bumps (or nodes) designed to interlock.

A Danish carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen dreamt up the idea in 1954. The name ‘Lego’ echoes the Danish phrase Leg godt, or ‘play well’. It’s a lovely fluke when you consider that lego is also Latin for ‘I collect’—surely what most parents end up saying as they gather the pieces after playtime.

Our second game has more to do with destruction than construction. Yet, strangely, JENGA arises from a Swahili word meaning ‘to build’. The game was created by a Tanzanian-born Brit named Leslie Scott, and launched in the 1980s.

To win at Jenga you need to pull out the wooden blocks from a rickety tower, piece by piece, without the whole thing toppling over. Chaos often follows, as hinted at by Jenga’s other names around the world. Israelis know the game as Mapolet, or avalanche. Danes prefer Klodsmajor, alias klutz. In Rio, meanwhile, the challenge is called Torremoto, a play on words meaning ‘tower-quake’.

1. LEGO is a jumble of OGLE (meaning ‘to look at wolfishly’). Can you look at these eight other words for look (or looks), and scramble each one to make a total of 15 words, where every letter is used once only?

2. Squeeze a T into LEGO and you spell LET GO. Now do the same with the clues below, adding a T to the first answer to reveal the second.

(a) droop/male deer (3/4) _ _ _ / _ _ _ _

(b) run off/naval unit (4/5) _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _

(c) decreasing/desiring (6/7)

_ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _

(d) out of practice/reliable (5/6)

_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _

(e) showy shells/pens together (7/2-6)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _- _ _ _ _ _ _

(f) went zzz?/went harrumph? (6/7)

_ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _

(g) educates/packing box (7/3,5)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

(h) hospital operator/fish (7/8)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

CURRENT GOSSIP

Water has timeless links to information. These days, office workers hear murmurs at the WATER COOLER, or maybe after work, drinking at the local WATERING HOLE. Long ago the rumour mill was the PARISH PUMP, where villagers would chat as they collected the day’s supply.

FURPHY is a great Australian word for a false story. No word of a lie, this term stretches back to World War I when diggers in Egypt and Palestine milled around a water cart to drink and wash—and, presumably, tell tall tales. The cart was called a furphy after its inventor, blacksmith John Furphy from Shepparton, Victoria.

The word SCUTTLEBUTT has similar origins. In this case the idle gossip arose from a drinking cask (or butt) aboard a sailing ship. The barrel had a hatched hole (or scuttle, from Spanish escotar, to cut out), allowing sailors to dip their ladles.

And to disprove the notion that watery words only offer dubious news, we finish our story in the Islamic world. To lead pure lives, Muslims obey SHARIA LAW, a set of rules founded on the Koran. The water link? Sharia is Arabic for the ‘path to the well’, where the holy word of Allah is viewed as the believer’s fountainhead.

1. Ironically, what succulent salt-water crustaceans swim in the letters of SPRING WATER? Every letter is used once only.

_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _

2. MOUTH-WATERING contains all five vowels once, as does CARRIED OUT. Supplied below are the first halves of nine more such terms, where every vowel appears once only. See if you can figure out the second word. (The number in brackets shows the omitted word’s length.)

(a) QUESTION (4) _ _ _ _

(b) BATHING (7) _ _ _ _ _ _ _

(c) UPWARDLY (6) _ _ _ _ _ _

(d) VAULTING (5) _ _ _ _ _

(e) FOUNTAIN (3) _ _ _

(f) LOUNGE (6) _ _ _ _ _ _

(g) PIANO (5) _ _ _ _ _

(h) PLASTIC (7) _ _ _ _ _ _ _

(i) AU (6) _ _ _ _ _ _

TURN, TURN, TURN

The Greek word for spiral is helikos. With a minor twist, the word gives us HELIX (plural ‘helices’ or ‘helixes’), the shape of a spring. Our bodies are full of helices, from the raised swirl that makes up the outer ear, to the double-helix shape of our DNA molecules.

HELICOPTER is another offshoot of helikos, combined with pteron—the Greek word for wing. (A chopper therefore is a spring-wing.) Mind you, the next chopper you come across may be a HELICOPTER PARENT, a mum or dad obsessed with their child’s safety and happiness, always hovering