The Bookworm's Alphabet Game.

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King in Yellow, The
by Robert W. Chambers

Lewis Carol

"Measure for Measure" by William Shakespeare

Nova


By Samuel R. Delaney

onomatopoeia, n.

1. a. The formation of a word from a sound associated with the thing or action being named; the formation of words imitative of sounds. Occas.: the fact or quality of being onomatopoeic.

1991 Sci. Amer. Apr. 78/1 Early words may have formed by onomatopoeia, as in bow-wow for dog, cuckoo for the familiar bird and whoosh for a puff of wind.

b. A word formed by onomatopoeia.

2. The use of echoic or suggestive language, esp. onomatopes, for rhetorical effect. Occas. in Music: the use of imitative or echoic instrumentation, rhythms, etc.

Hence onomatopoeial, onomatopoeian, onomatopoeious, onomatopoeial, etc.

PALINDROME: A word, sentence, or verse that reads the same way backward or foreward. Certain words in English naturally function as palindromes: for instance, civic, rotor, race car, radar, level and so on. However, when individuals seek to combine several words at once, the result becomes a sort of perverse art. Here are some longer English examples culled from J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:

* Madame, I'm Adam.
* Sir, I'm Iris.
* Able was I ere I saw Elba. (attributed apocryphally to Napoleon, who was exiled on Elba, though in historical fact he apparently spoke no English!)
* A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!
* Sex at noon taxes.
* "Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel." (anonymous 18th-century gravestone)
* Straw? No, too stupid a fad; I put soot on warts!
* "Deliver desserts," demanded Nemesis--emended, named, stressed, reviled.
* T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: "Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet." (W. H. Auden)

* Stop Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots!

The tradition goes back a long ways. Cuddon notes several, including a Greek palindrome inscribed on a vial of holy water in Saint Sophia's church in Constantinople that translates as "Wash not only my face, but also my sins." A Latin example is the palindrome, "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" which means "We [moths] fly in circles by night and we will be consumed in fire." Probably the most excessive use of palindromes is the 1802 collection by Ambrose Pamperis, in which Pamperis writes 416 palindromic verses celebrating Catherine the Great's military campaigns (See Cuddon 673-74).

More about palindromes here: http://primes.utm.edu/top20/page.php?id=53

QUADRIVIUM: The study of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, which formed the basis of a master's degree in medieval education, as opposed to the trivium, the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which in medieval education formed the basis of a bachelor's degree.

"Red Storm Rising" by Tom Clancy

'Serpentine' by Tommy Thompson. Incomplete biography of serial killer and con man Charles Sobhraj.

TELESTICH: A poem in which the last letters of successive lines form a word, phrase, or consecutive letters of the alphabet. Compare with abecedarian poem and acrostic.

"Unto the Sons" by Gay Talese

VERISIMILITUDE: The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable. For instance, the reader possesses a sense of verisimilitude when reading a story in which a character cuts his finger, and the finger bleeds. If the character's cut finger had produced sparks of fire rather than blood, the story would not possess verisimilitude. Note that even fantasy novels and science fiction stories that discuss impossible events can have verisimilitude if the reader is able to read them with suspended disbelief. Cf. Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

World of Ptavvs
Larry Niven's first published novel.

Xenophon

YAHOO: A coarse, filthy, smelly, bestial, barbaric, bipedal creature only vaguely resembling a human. Jonathan Swift coined the term in Gulliver's Travels, applying it to a race of humanoid brutes in contrast with the civilized race of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms. The term has since become a popular allusion. Mark Twain and other writers use it to refer to bumpkins, louts, or yokels. One wonders what the internet search engine Yahoo thus implies about its users. The term yahoo has also become a popular outcry or exclamation when a speaker is engaged in something boisterous.

Zombie Lover

Piers Anthony

Zombie Lover is the newest installment of the Xanth series. We have some favorite characters return, including Bink and Chameleon. We meet new characters, including one of the main characters, Breanna, a girl from the Black Village.