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| From Technology Review, July 1996 Anagrams Made Easy . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan ONE OF THE FEW TRAITS I admit to sharing with Hannibal Lecter, the gruesome antihero of Silence of the Lambs, is a fondness for fava beans. Really, they're not as bad as they look, particularly if savored with a nice Chianti. We have another passion in common, though, one that I'm almost ashamed to mention: a love of anagrams. Call it a mental tic—a camel tint, an intact elm. At times the urge to rearrange the letters on billboards, license plates, or bathroom products (especially those) is simply overwhelming. Introduced at a party to someone named Marianne, I might slip and say, "Nice to meet you, Armenian." This is no great sign of intelligence (and no great source of dates either). My Scrabble score is unremarkable, and the simple transpositions I usually indulge in—tide, tied, edit, diet—are of a kind that cats probably do to pass the time between meals. Truly devious anagrammatists scramble words in ways the rest of us can only marvel at: heavy rain?/hire a navy; dormitory/dirty room; astronomer/no more stars/moon starers; desperation/a rope ends it; Presbyterian/best in prayer. A few late nights in the monastery must have gone into transforming "Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum" ("Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee") into "Virgo serena, pia, munda, et immaculata" ("Virgin serene, holy, pure, and immaculate"). So it is with a mixture of sadness and glee that compulsive scramblers watch the baton of anagrammatic skill pass from monks and convicts—those with a lot of time on their hands—to computers. Anagram generators, a form of software now widely available, take the brainwork out of recombinant wordplay. What wordsmiths used to achieve through patience and wit, software can do through brute force. When I asked Ars Magna, a popular Macintosh shareware program, for anagrams of "Technology Review," it obliged with thousands of possibilities, generating a file that swelled to 476K before giving my Power Mac a grand-mal seizure. Likewise, a multilingual anagram generator on the Web handed me hundreds of combinations of the word "anagramming." But many were so obscure that I had to make sure the program was set for English. "Grim maga nan," "minar mang ga"—would that be Gaelic? Anglo-Saxon? The cries of the proverbial thousand monkeys? With so many choices, the burden of finding a suitable anagram still rests on humans. To narrow the results, a commercial program called Anagram Genius lets you specify, among other things, whether your subject is male, female, or inanimate; whether you aim to flatter or to satirize; and whether you wish to see "vulgar" words (why even ask?). But ultimately only we know if an anagram has that zing. Therein lies the thrill of discovery, which anagram generators provide in a Cuban den—er, in abundance. One can only envy the user of Anagram Genius who (according to the developer's Web site) entered the phrase "the meaning of life" and uncovered "the fine game of nil." Or the person who typed "President Boris Yeltsin" and turned up "endless insobriety trip," or who transformed "Scottish National Party" into "oh nasty tartan politics." My exhaustive search for anagrams on "Technology Review" yielded nothing quite so apt—I don't think the magazine would want to use "the clever yogi won" in its promotional material. What the search did provide was inspiration. It heated my Muse to a fever of productivity and would not let me rest until I had completed the world's first lyric poem in which every line is an anagram of "Technology Review." I call this little beauty "Cooler Even Thy Wig": O the cowering levy, o the glycerine vow. I clothe every gown with coy green love. They love cowering who in covert elegy hotly vow in Greece to howl icy revenge. They grieve, cowl on over Ceylon wig, the once weighty lover. We've no gothic lyre. We've no glory ethic. We've no holy rig, etc.— no wet gyro vehicle or cogent ivy wheel. Yet her novice glow wove gently heroic. Cheery evil won't go. Ivy gel won't cohere. They grow violence with yon clever ego, never with ecology. Why, o genetic lover, or why genetic love— oh wry genetic love— glory once with Eve? Or convey with glee their coy Gwen? Love the low grey novice. Review thy cologne, Greenwich love-toy. Haunting, isn't it? Notice that without any prompting, the Ars Magna software allowed me (and I must emphasize that I was merely the conduit) to use words like "o" and "thy," and even to lace the work with classical allusions ("Greece")—the hallmarks of a quality poem. I find the result of this collaboration deeply satisfying, and it certainly makes as much sense as any poem I've read in The New Yorker lately. Like other unsavory habits of Hannibal the Cannibal, the compulsion to scramble letters may be a disease without a cure. The proliferation of anagram software may at least raise awareness of the condition, allowing sufferers to live without shame, as free as a butt flyer. Or was it a butterfly? db |