10 June 2005: Word games is the subject today--actually, one word game. The object is to make five words that are all spelled the same except that each has a different vowel:
lust lost list last lest
moss mass mess muss miss
tan ten tin tun ton
I'm sure I didn't invent this game, but can't remember when I started noodling with it. It's been an infrequent pastime for idle durations in a doctor's office or the like. But I did put a series of such words into a Poem poem, one of the very few sets of two-syllable words satisfying the game's aim I've found:
pitting patting potting putting petting
Another would be the "moss" one above with "es" added to each word in the set. I haven't come up with a set of two syllable words whose members weren't just one-syllables words with standard prefixes or suffixes added. The closest:
batter better bitter butter botter
My impression is that there are a lot of 4-word solutions to this game's problem. Not so many one-word solutions like:
mob mab meb mib mub
Thinking about that just now made me wonder how hard it would be to find a solution with zero members, such as:
len lan lin lun lon
flith flath fluth floth fleth
Not that hard, I guess. . . . Idle game, no doubt, but infraverbal, and probably good exercise for word-people. I shouldn't have said that. Now I have an urge to take some brief canonical poem and (1) make all its vowels the same. Maybe make five versions, each exclusively using only one of the five main vowels. Or such a poem with the vowels put in alphabetically. I think I won't, saved by laziness yet again.
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