“Significant other” is an anagram of “I fight containers.”
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Who figures these things out?! I can only do them by pulling out Scrabble (or Bananagram tiles) and moving them around with my hands. “Significant other” just wouldn’t be one I’d think to investigate.
In spite of my deficiencies with word puzzles, “Jammycakes” takes the cake.
It’s an anagram of James McKay.
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One of the mysteries of Biologos solved. Though I think the sound of a child saying James McKay is perhaps just as compelling.
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That’s ahead of this:
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In the case of “jammycakes” it was one of my dad’s Bible College students. I was a teenager at the time and I’d been inspired to get into anagrams myself by the great British Christian classic, The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37¾. Anyone who has read it will know that his fictional son Gerald goes through a phase of being obsessed with anagrams, working out, for example, that “Billy Graham” is an anagram of “Big Rally Ham” and “Gerald Coates” is an anagram of “God’s Ale Crate.”
This kind of inspired me to get into coming up with a few anagrams of my own.
One day I found myself alone in one of the lecture rooms at the college where he taught, and so I grabbed a bit of chalk and started writing down some of the ones that I’d worked out on the board. A few hours later, I returned to find that someone else had been in the lecture room and had appended another one to the list. It said, “James McKay is an anagram of Jammy Cakes.” It kind of stuck, and then when Internet forums came along I ended up using it as my username.
Incidentally, one of the ones I worked out, having newly discovered YECism at the time and being all excited about it, was that “evolutionist” is an anagram of “evil out to sin.” Since then, however, I have also worked out that “young earth creationism” is an anagram of “U reactionary something.”
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Thank you, @jammycakes . This was delightful.
And of course, I didn’t notice that Jammy Cakes is an anagram. If you say it out loud, it just sounds a lot like a reasonable mispronunciation of your name. So, your dad’s student (or whoever got to the board after you) was a double puzzle master. Probably Will Shortz on a study-abroad program (Will Shortz - Wikipedia).
Adrian Plass sounds pretty funny. Plenty of days, I’m grateful for kid lit.
@Paraleptopecten, this is fantastic. So many to choose from. I’m kind of partial to Mold Reaction and Doom Clarinet myself, but I could really use a Denim Locator most mornings.
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Thanks, Phil. I may be wrong, but at least I feel validated!
The best anagram ever – the Latin anagram answers Pilate’s question:
Quid est veritas? “What is truth?”
Est vir qui adest: “It is the man who is here.”
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I see your “jammy cakes” and I raise my “dead evil”.
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Mine’s long enough to be more difficult “Chama temp dill vid boy” and “l limp hot byte com” are the only things I’ve come up with.
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I think there is an important difference between pseudoscience and bad science. To use a sports reference, if you strike out 50% of the time at the plate then you are a bad baseball player. If you think swinging a broomstick in your living room is baseball then you don’t know what baseball is.
Continuing with the analogy, baseball is about the rules, and so too is science. The scientific method is the rule book. What differentiates bad science from pseudoscience is that pseudoscience doesn’t follow the rules. According to my very hazy memory of the cold fusion fiasco from decades ago, I think it came down to poor interpretation of experimental data. I would call that bad science.
The type of pseudoscience I often see is human intuition masquerading as empirical science. Someone will take a few chosen bits of data and then say something to the effect of, “Well, it makes sense that the cause is X because that just makes sense to me.” This would be akin to Rationalism, the school of thought that the secrets of nature could be determined by the application of human intuition and rational thought. The scientific revolution replaced Rationalism with Empiricism which required objective data to support conclusions.
There is nothing wrong with some hands on experience, but I also think that bible school students would also benefit greatly if they learned about the birth of the modern scientific method and the philosophy behind it.
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The secret is out! Now we may have to shut the whole operation down. Thanks a lot, Jammycakes!
I’m happy to inform everyone that one of my anagrams is: “Biker vote firm”. It shows where I stand.
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Thanks, Merv. Now I have to clean the coffee off my computer screen.
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U reactionary something …
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Update: I tried entering my name into a couple of anagram solvers. They said no results. I guess that somewhat vindicates my bizarre answers.
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Must be broken. You can’t get Timothy Campbell from “no results”.
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Bummer, they keep giving up with 10-letter words for Kendel Darragh. : (
Maybe I should try my maiden name?! Bwahahahaha!
That’s an unusual maiden name. Is that why you married?
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Kendel Reimann to Kendel Darragh = “Foreign-sounding” to “Lord knows what or how to pronounce it.”
No improvement in the situation via name change. I happened to gain a proposal from the best man I know, though. Hard to turn that down.
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