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Anagrams are words or phrases made by rearranging the letters of other words or phrases. Their origin goes right back to the dawn of recorded history. Initially, they were perceived as harboring secret or prophetic messages. Eerily, anagrams can be constructed that seem to shed light on a person's character.
Two famous ones are by Lewis Carroll-one on the name of the British humanitarian Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), which provides her with a fitting eulogy, and the other on the name of the British political agitator William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), which brings out Gladstone's firebrand personality-seem to bear out the prophetic value of anagrams:
Florence Nightingale = Flit on, cheering angel!
William Ewart Gladstone = Wild agitator! Means well!
Throughout history, many famous personages avowed their belief in the revelatory power of anagrams. During the siege of the city of Tyre, Alexander the Great was apparently troubled by a dream he had in which a satyr appeared to him. The next morning he summoned his soothsayers to interpret the dream. They pointed out that the word "satyr" itself contained the answer, because the Greek word for "satyr" was an anagram of "Tyre is thine." Reassured, Alexander went on to conquer the city on the subsequent day.
Before engaging in some anagram fun so that you can test out for yourself if anagrams do indeed have any "secret code power," here are a few historical anecdotes that seem to bear out their prophetic or mystical properties. These have become part of a kind of "urban legend encyclopedia" of anagram history.
• As recorded by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of the English Language, one of the most famous anagrams of all time was devised in the Middle Ages. Its unknown author contrived it as a Latin dialogue between Pilate and Jesus. Jesus' answer to Pilate's question Quid est veritas? ("What is truth?") is phrased as an anagram of the letters of that very question: Est vir qui adest ("It is the man before you").
• Mary Queen of Scots, who died by execution, was posthumously memorialized with the Latin expression Trusavi regnis morte amara cada ("Thrust by force from my kingdom I fall by a foul death"), which is an anagram of Maria Steuarda Scotarum Regina ("Mary Stewart Queen of Scots") (Note that V = U in Latin script).
• Shortly after Henry IV of France was assassinated in 1610 by an unscrupulous man named Ravillac, to everyone's amazement, it was discovered that Henricus IV Galliarum rex ("Henry IV, King of the Gauls"), when rearranged, became In herum exurgis Ravillac ("From these Ravillac rises up").
Anagrams are also found in narratives of all kinds. One of my own favorites is the one used in Roman Polanski in his 1968 horror masterpiece Rosemary's Baby. Three weeks before her delivery date, Rosemary gets a call informing her that Hutch has tragically died. At the burial ceremony, she is handed a book titled All of Them Witches, which was about the practices of various witches and warlocks. One of these is Adrian Marcato. She notices that the name of Adrian Marcato's son Steven is underlined, whereupon she realizes that Steven Marcato is an anagram for Roman Castevet, her neighbor. Rosemary thus begins to suspect that the Castevets and their friends have formed a coven, and that her unborn baby's blood will be used in their rituals.
The use of anagrams in books, cinema, television, and pop culture is quite extensive. For example, in a Simpson's episode (Homer's Night Out), Bart notices a sign at a restaurant with Cod Platter on it. He rearranges it to spell Cold Pet Rat. The grumpy Dr. Gregory House of the TV program House notes, in one episode, that his name can be anagrammatized appropriately to Huge Ego Sorry. The list could go on and on. You might want to provide some in response to this blog.
The point at which anagrams became part of recreational culture is hard to pinpoint historically. The writer John Dryden characterized anagrams as the "torturing of one poor word ten thousand ways," thus alluding to the fact that they had become a "puzzle craze" already by the seventeenth century. There is only one "rule" in doing anagrams-every letter must be used, with exactly the same number of occurrences as in the original word or phrase. Solutions that fall short of this rule are called "imperfect anagrams." I will provide classic anagrams (old and current). These are found in all kinds of word puzzle collections and online at www.wordsmith.org/anagram. There you can also input any word or phrase, including you name, and you will get it anagrammatized automatically. I will restrict the number of anagrams to 6-10 per category, otherwise we could literally fill a book with them. I also welcome your own anagrams in response to this blog. I should also mention that psychologists use "anagram tests" for assessing intelligence and other skills. I too believe that they activate "brain power" because they involve manipulating symbols and their combinations, and thus activate (in all likelihood) both discrete-point (identification) and holistic thinking in tandem.
Word Anagrams
Let's start with examples of the most basic type of anagram puzzle-rearranging the letters of a given word to produce a new word. For example, the letters in the word evil can be rearranged to produce veil or live.
(1) orchestra
(2) Elvis
(3) listen
(4) butterfly
(5) admirer
(6) persist
(7) riptides
(8) create
Word-to-Phrase Anagrams
For this type, the idea is to produce a phrase or sentence by anagrammatizing a given word: for example, astronomer will yield moon starer or No more stars! You might have to capitalize some letters or vice versa, as well as having to add or delete an apostrophe, a period, or other mark, and, of course, you will have to add spaces.
(9) funeral
(10) dormitory
(11) earnestness
(12) schoolmaster
(13) evangelist
(14) postmaster
(15) waitress
(16) Presbyterian
(17) Christianity
(18) old masters
Phrase-to-Word Anagrams
This type of anagram is the reverse of the previous one. The idea is to produce a word from a phrase or sentence: for example, the letters in the phrase Is pity love? can be rearranged to form the single word Positively!-a rather neat answer, no?
(19) So, let's pinch!
(20) nice to imports
(21) voices rant on
(22) ill fed
(23) life's aim
(24) more tiny
By the way, note that anagrams seem to provide apt commentaries on the meanings of the original words or phrases. The answers to puzzles (13), (22), and (24) actually turn a word or phrase into one with the opposite meaning. These are called "antigrams:" evil's agent = evangelist.
Phrase-to-Phrase Anagrams
Now, from the letters of each given phrase, can you form another phrase or a sentence? For example, the letters of the phrase the golden days will yield the sentence They gladden so!
(25) the countryside
(26) a time to charm Venus
(27) the eyes
(28) the cockroach
(29) meaning of life
(30) the Hilton
Name-to-Phrase
Certainly the most "prophetic" of all anagrams seem to be the ones that involve the names of people, especially famous ones. For example, anagrammatizing Clint Eastwood you get, rather appropriately, old West action. No wonder that throughout the ancient world, it was commonly believed that personal names foretold the fates of individuals. People would often wear amulets with anagrams of their names on them to ward off evil. Is a name a portent of destiny and character, or as the Romans put it, nomen est omen (a name is an omen)? It is fitting to end this blog with the names of several famous (or infamous) personages to test out this hypothesis. By the way, such anagrams are called "commentary anagrams."
(31) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(32) England's Queen Victoria
(33) Madam Curie
(34) George Bush
(35) Madonna Louise Ciccone
(36) Elvis Aaron Presley
(37) Vin Diesel
(38) Tom Cruise
One Last Word
I cannot help but make a final philosophical comment, begging the reader's indulgence. The deeply-entrenched belief in the revelatory power of anagrams is a curious, yet strangely compelling, one. Perhaps the ancients were right all along. Today, science is confronting one of the most difficult anagrams ever devised by Nature itself-the DNA. The nucleotides that make up an individual's DNA are not unlike anagrams, since they do indeed predict the individual's destiny.
Answers
(1) carthorse
(2) lives (veils)
(3) silent (enlist)
(4) flutter-by
(5) married
(6) stripes
(7) spirited
(8) trace
(9) real fun
(10) dirty room
(11) a stern sense
(12) the classroom
(13) evil's agent
(14) stamp store
(15) A stew, Sir?
(16) best in prayer
(17) I cry that sin
(18) art's models
(19) clothespins
(20) protectionism
(21) conversation
(22) filled
(23) families
(24) enormity
(25) no city dust here
(26) the summer vacation
(27) They see.
(28) Cook, catch her!
(29) the fine game of nil
(30) Hint: Hotel
(31) won half the New World's glory
(32) governs a nice, quiet land
(33) radium came
(34) He bugs Gore.
(35) Occasional nude income
(36) Seen alive? Sorry, pal!
(37) I end lives.
(38) So, I'm cuter.
