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L’Ishing du Gwujlang II

by Dorothea Dorfman and Theodora Mundorf
with additional assistance from Lini Nealey and Lucia Chaloux

Attentive readers will already be familiar with l’ishing from our earlier discussion (SpecGram CLXVIII.4). Though superficially similar to French verlan, l’ishing interchanges words that map onto one another when some portion of the sounds at the end of a given word are moved to the front, or vice versa. For example, dinner /dɪnər/ and innard /ɪnərd/ can be used in place of one another, as in “I’m hungry, let’s get some innard.”, or “That guy just cut that other guy’s stomach and a bit of his dinner came out.”

Unlike verlan, l’ishing words generally cannot be concocted on the fly, so glossaries have been created for initiates. However, words are not listed in the glossaries, only mnemonically merged definitions (MMDs). For example:

an evening meal for an intestine (referring to an innard dinner)

We have acquired another clutch of such MMDs, and seek your help in determining the paired words they refer to. The MMDs are provided below.



In order to increase the response rate from SpecGram readers, The SpecGram Puzzle Elves™ have again agreed to treat this as a puzzle. Submit your answers to the editors of SpecGram by June 15, 2014, and you could win a prize.* Some most likely correct answers and winners will be announced in the July issue.

Disclaimer

Your dialect and/or transcription system may vary.

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Word Ladder 一
Solution

In other puzzle-related news, the solution to last month’s Word Ladder 一 puzzle has been provided here. A whole heaping bunch of puzzlemeisters figured this one out. Of the countless millions of correct answers, the following were selected for recognition and prizes:

Cindy Almond • Sara Kessler • Siva Kalyan • Zack De

Honorable mentions also go to Adam Hesterberg, Eric Chen, Keith Slater, and Tuuli Mustasydän. They get no prizes, but will have glory everlasting.

* Note that SpecGram Anti-Hoarding Guidelines stipulate that puzzle-related prizes cannot be won by anyone who has won a puzzle-related prize in the last three months—though honor, fame, and glory may still be seized† on the metaphorical field of puzzle-related battle.

† Except where taxed, prohibited by law, or otherwise restricted, constrained, limited, regulated, controlled, hindered, impeded, hampered, obstructed, checked, curbed, shackled, confined, or otherwise subject to thesaural interference.

What is That Mess on the Cover?—The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics Cover Contest—Advertisement
SpecGram Vol CLXX, No 2 Contents