Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

This is a word geek entry. Check out the various styles of knuckle tattoos below:

The left and right examples are the most common ways of doing lettering on fingers — one or two words are placed on the fingers and are read from left to right. Pretty basic and not too confusing. Getting a little more complicated you've got the example in the middle where the word is split between two hands, and can only be read when the fingers are intermeshed like this — the hands on their own read “EULT” and “QAIY”, but when combined spell out “EQUALITY” in this example.

That's cool and all, but of course “EULT” and “QAIY” are gibberish by themselves. I got to thinking that there must be at least a few combinations of words that are valid both as four letter words and as meshed eight letter words, so I wrote a little application to analyze my dictionary files to find out. Here's a few examples that I discovered:

First hand	Second hand		Combined
LORD	BODE		BLOODRED
CLIT	ALSO		CALLISTO
CERE	HEIR		CHEERIER
ONES	CUTS		COUNTESS
ELSE	NITE		ENLISTEE
GONE	RUDD		GROUNDED
MENS	EKES		MEEKNESS
PAMS	SLIT		PSALMIST
COLD	SHOE		SCHOOLED
TERM	HOES		THEOREMS
WIDE	ERIS		WEIRDIES

I'm not buying “WEIRDIES” being much of a word but my dictionary claims it is! In addition to the eleven I've listed above, I found twenty six more combinations of four letter words that could be meshed into valid eight letter words in this way… Does this mean I have too much time on my hands? Or just that I'm a fool when it comes to deciding how the limited time I have gets consumed?

I think my favorite is “PAMS SLIT” because it sounds so nasty, but the true meaning is the oh-so-holy and not at all nasty “PSALMIST”… “COLD SHOE” is pretty funny too.

Oh yeah, and while I've got you: ModBlog is back!