After much vacation and many travels, I’ve returned to the blog. And my first posting has nothing to do with bibliography, something to do with VN, and more to do with a favorite VN pastime, word games.

From yesterday’s (31 August 2009) New York Times, Science Section, “After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm” by John Markoff, third paragraph, third sentence: “The leaking electrons make it more difficult to know when a transistor is in an on or off state, the information that makes electronic computing possible.”

Have you ever seen five two letter words (here, “is in an on or”) used consecutively (and unconsciously, I presume) in one sentence in a piece of journalism? And even more startlingly, the five form, in their written order, a perfect “word golf” sequence, from “is” to “or”.

As you certainly know, word golf was a hobby of John Shade, the American poet who was (or perhaps wasn’t) killed by Jakob Gradus in Pale Fire. A word golf solver takes a starting word and creates a chain of successive words by changing only one letter at each step, until he/she has reached the target word. As Charles Kinbote points out, you can do a word golf sequence with hate-love in three steps, lass-male in four (lass-mass-mars-mare-male) and live-dead in five (with “lend” in the middle).

The five-word is-or sequence is obviously not the shortest possible, as word golf calls for. You could do it in two steps if you use the slightly uncommon word “os” as the intermediary. There are other possibilities. But the point here is that it was done by chance.