25 September 2009
Anagrams
I haven't checked the equivalence of the two statements, but anagrams of long passages are not difficult to create.
Here are two examples from my files (credit unknown):
"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..."
Anagrams as: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."
And -
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind --Neil Armstrong"
anagrammed: "A thin man ran; makes a large stride, left planet, pins flag on moon. On to mars."
And finally, this famous coupling -
"This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland."
- which anagrams as...
"The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too."
Credit for the last one to Harper's Magazine (February 1997, letters to editor).
Photo credit.
Just as an aside, Christian Bok is an interesting writer. He wrote a book about 8 years ago called "Eunoia", which he says is the shortest word in the English language to contain all 5 vowels. The book is divided into sections, one for each vowel, and all the words in that section contain only that vowel. It's a little esoteric for the reader, but he does manage to have some sort of cohesive narrative using only one vowel sound at a time!
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