More reasons that your dictionary is inadequate

James Somers, writer of many fine stimulating blog posts and a nice recent profile of Douglas Hofstadter (titled "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think"), has published a long blog post on what makes a good dictionary. He addresses the importance of a proper dictionary to a writer who wants to write well, and he closes with instructions on how to install such a dictionary on all your electronic devices.

Here is his "You’re probably using the wrong dictionary".

How to remember the number of tiles to start off with in Bananagrams

The simplicity of Bananagrams is one of its strong points. But there is one rule that always seems to cause debate and searching for the instructions: The number of tiles that each player is supposed to begin with. The rules call for the following initial tile counts:

• 2-4 players - 21 tiles
  
• 5-6 players - 15 tiles
  
• more than 6 players - 11 tiles

I find it easy to remember the cutoffs for each level, probably because 4 and 6 are both even. And 21, the number of tiles when playing with 4 players, is burned into my memory. So here is my mnemonic for determining the other numbers: After the cutoff for 4 players, subtract 6 tiles. After the cutoff for 6 players, subtract 4 more tiles.

That should shave ten seconds off my next Bananagrams match. Plus now I am no longer bothered about losing my set of Bananagrams instructions.

Tactics to help you win at Bananagrams

Through playing many, many games of Bananagrams, I have learned a few lessons about how to approach the game:

• Concentrate on making words out of the hardest letters first to get them out of the way.
  
  
• Try to make one long word at the beginning and build off of it. In general, the longer your words are, the more places there will be to build new words.
  
  
• Particularly at the beginning, when you flip over all your letters, try to assess the balance between consonants and vowels. If it is off, you can try to make vowel-heavy or consonant-heavy words [See what to do when you have too many consonants and what to do when you have too many vowels.]. It's far better to do this from the outset, than to have a mostly-finished grid and realize that you need to go back and remodel the whole thing.
  
  
• Try to structure your grid in a more open way.
  
  Good:

     CHILL      
         I 
         POST

  Not-as-good:

     CHILL
         I
      STOP

  The former is far easier to build new words off of:
  

     A
     CHILL W
     U   I A  
     T   POST
     E      O

  We could even quantify the difference between the two approaches. In the first case, words can be build up or down (or both) from 5 letters (C,H,I,S,T) and just in one direction from 2 more (the L and the O). In the second case, there are 8 letters that one can build off of in only one direction. The number of words you can make with the H in any position (HUE, OCHRE, EACH) versus just making words that start or end with a given letter, is definitely bigger than a factor of 2... I'm going to conservatively estimate it to be 3 times larger. Then the flexibility scores of the two grids above would be 3*5+2=17 and 8*1=8. And the advantage of choosing an open structure only grows as the grid becomes larger. It's often the difference between smoothly adding letters to your grid and having to completely rearrange things.
  
  
• When you are in the peeling phase, keep in mind one or two words that you can steal letters from and positions where you can easily add tiles to make new words. Or words that you can easily anagram (with the newly peeled letter) to make a new word.
  Suppose you have the grid below and you peel an A.

       TRY
       I
       E
     FORKS

  From FORKS, you can take the S and combine it with the A to from SAY:

         S
         A
       TRY
       I
       E
     FORK

  Now that I'm thinking about FORK and SAY, I note that the K from FORK could be substituted for the more-easily-used A in SAY to form SKY. So if the next letter I peeled was R, I could quickly make that switch, freeing up the A to build the word FAR:

         S
         K
       TRY
       I
       E
     FOR
     A
     R

  At this stage, I might wind up extending FOR to FORT or FORD or FOUR or FORE or anagramming it to ROOF, depending on what letter become available. It would be nice to build SKY into RISKY. And FAR looks like an appealing place for making FARM, FAIR, or FARE.
  

The speed of Bananagrams is such that you will not be able to consider every possible move, but having just a few rules of thumb to keep you from getting boxed in can allow you to still play fast while increasing your chances of winning.

Word Game Poetry

The idea of rearranging a set of Scrabble tiles to form a poem has been around for a long time. James Ernest of Cheapass Games is credited with popularizing Scrabble poems.

Here is an example of his Scrabble poetry, formed from 98 letters and 2 blanks:

FANATICS
YOU SEE
HAVE TAKEN OUR QUIET BURG

THEY CLIP POWER LINES
JAM _ADIO AND TV

FIRE BLAZING NEXT DOOR

WOE

I MIS_ GERALDO

This is obviously a work of fiction since no one really misses Geraldo.

I found a six stanza poem, in iambic pentameter, with each stanza made up of the 100 tiles of a Scrabble set. The first one reads:

THROUGH SENTIENT, GAUZY FLAME I VIEW LIFE'S DREAD,
QUIXOTIC, PARTIAL JOKE. WE'RE VAPOUR-BORN,
BY LOGIC AND EMOTION SEEN AS deAD.

It is an amazing achievement in Scrabble poetry.

Inspired, I have written what I believe to be the first Bananagrams poem, using all of the 144 Bananagrams letters.

I call it "Box in Woks".

I SMUGGLE A JAPANESE PUZZLE BOX IN A WOK.

THE BOX IS AJAR!

QUIVERING IN ANTICIPATION, I QUICKLY WRITE A BANANAGRAMS ODE.

"FEED LEFTOVER WORDS

TO HER VULTURE.

DECODE THE MYSTERY FOOD."

---

HOWTO:
The process of writing such a thing is not unlike playing a game of Bananagrams: it's easy at first, but then as you approach the end, you realize that you have to rearrange and optimize things more carefully and then iterate. "Iterating, I converge on a solution. Bananas!" Depending on how picky you are, it can take a really long time.

I didn't use this, but a useful guide to this kind of project is the The Art of Long Anagramming page.

If you would like to make your own Bananagrams poem, pangram, or other long anagram, this site has a Flash application that helps you track the number of each letter and the total sentence length. There are also downloadable versions for offline use.

Finally, this anagram generator has an advanced search, allowing the requirement or exclusion of words which is incredibly helpful.