- HOME
- INTRO TO THE FORUM
- USE AND MISUSE
- BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY SPOKEN
- GETTING
TO KNOW ENGLISH - PREPARING FOR ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TESTS
- GOING DEEPER INTO ENGLISH
- YOU ASKED ME THIS QUESTION
- EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM
- ADVICE AND DISSENT
- MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
- STUDENTS' SOUNDING BOARD
- LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
- THE LOUNGE
- NOTABLE WORKS BY OUR VERY OWN
- ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO
- When It Greatly Matters What English Accent We've Acquired
- A Potent Tool For Whittling Down Complex Sentences Into Simple Ones
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English - II
- A Unified Approach To The Proper Use Of Punctuation In English - III
- Steeling Ourselves Against Common Subject-Verb Disagreement Pitfalls
- ABOUT JOSE CARILLO
- READINGS ABOUT LANGUAGE
- TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
- NEWS AND COMMENTARY
- BOOKSHOP
- ARCHIVES
LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
Making yourself more proficient in English need not be a drag. You can actually speed up the learning process and make it fun by generously lacing it with humor—but preferably the best that the English language can offer.
In this new section, apart from giving a fixed slot to our weekly “In a Lighter Vein” pop-out humor piece in the Forum homepage, we have put together the finest of those weekly humor pop-ups since the Forum started. The best of them—collected from various sources on the web and sent in by friends—are all here, posted in the Forum under the following headings: Wordplay, On the Job, Student and School Life, and Miscellany.
So if you missed any of the best of the Forum’s weekly humor pop-ups, you can enjoy and savor them again and again here—and better still, share them with your friends!
Click here to go to the board (requires registration to post)
Some Really Amazing Anagrams
We all know what an “anagram” is. It’s wordplay where the letters of a word or phrase are rearranged, using all of the original letters absolutely one time only, to form a new word or phrase. Plain and simple anagrams like, say,“orchestra = carthorse” are quaint but aren’t really that exciting. The most intriguing and most enigmatic anagrams are those that in some way playfully reflect on or take a dig at the original phrase, as in “Florence Nightingale =Flit on, cheering angel,” “George Bush = He bugs Gore” and “Madonna Louise Ciccone = Occasional nude income.”
Here are 15 anagrams that aspire to that exalted and exciting status:
Dormitory == Dirty Room
***
Desperation == A Rope Ends It
***
The Morse Code == Here Come Dots
***
Slot Machines == Cash Lost in 'em
***
Animosity == Is No Amity
***
Snooze Alarms == Alas! No More Z’s
***
Alec Guinness == Genuine Class
***
Semolina == Is No Meal
***
The Public Art Galleries == Large Picture Halls, I Bet
***
A Decimal Point == I’m a Dot in Place
***
The Earthquakes == That Queer Shake
***
Eleven plus two == Twelve plus one
***
Contradiction == Accord not in it
***
This one, from Hamlet by Shakespeare, is truly amazing:
“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.”
It anagrammatically becomes:
“In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.”
***
And here’s our grand anagrammatic finale:
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”—Neil A. Armstrong
It becomes:
“A thin man ran; makes a large stride; left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!”
Go to Wordplay now!
Go to On the Job now
Go to Student and School Life now!
Go to Miscellany now!
