cunning

linguistic tricks

Marcus Tullius

Cicero was a pretty dab hand in a courtroom, and not because of the rules of evidence. In 2001 I studied his defence of Caelius in the Pro Caelio. A masterpiece of wit and invective, Cicero's oratio amused, bemused and confused the jury enough to acquit.

Read the text in Latin and English at The Perseus Digital Library - an extraordinarily comprehensive digital library of ancient textual and other materials.

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Synantonyms

Reginald Hill is my favourite detective novel crime writer. In fact one of his characters, a certain DI Peter Pascoe, is number 2 on my To Do list - at the moment Christian Martyr from Moulin Rouge leads by a nose. He is a literate and satisfying author whose books I can't put down, although I am devastated to complete one because it takes a while between releases. (Especially now he's dead.)

Actually, I don 't think he died, just changed publishers. It looks like Random House and HarperCollins both have designated "official" sites.

In the Dalziel and Pascoe novel Dialogues of the Dead I was introduced to the concept of synantonyms - words which describe both something and its antithesis. The list below is from the book (p 417), and I am going to try to add to it myself.

• overlook
• impregnable
• cleave
• strict
• inflammable

I'd love to hear from anyone who comes up with more for the list.

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Ars Magna

Anagrams are excellent fun. It was Linda Goodman's contention that all the anagrams of a word were conceptually present within the thing represented by the word and further, that the ease by which one word changed into another also related to those conceptual links. If you want to know more about what she thought, read Star Signs.

Quite aside from all that however, is the enjoyment one can get from anagrams of everyday stuff. A great online server is Anagram Genius, and if you've bared your buttocks to the Great Satan you can download a free Windoze version - although the online generator does way cool work. Sadly, they no longer offer their services gratis, so for free fun try the Internet Anagram Server - I, Rearrangement Servant.

For those of you of my heart, look for older Mac shareware programs Ars Magna and Karma Manager, or try the not-too-imaginatively-named Anagrams (OS X). For a variety of other options, visit Anagrammy.

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