"As Tiny Tim might say in speaking of Christmas afternoon as an institution, 'God help us, every one.'"

If by now you've had it up to here with good will toward men and Christmas cheer, not to mention feuding family members and their grousing offspring, take comfort in Robert Benchley's humorous account of the Gummidge family's Christmas--written "in the manner, if not the spirit" of Charles Dickens:

In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming, gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating--and true enough she didn't--a dragging, devitalizing ennui, which left its victims strewn about the living-room in various attitudes of prostration suggestive of those of the petrified occupants in a newly unearthed Pompeiian dwelling; an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly veiled insults, and which ended in ruptures in the clan spirit serious enough to last throughout the glad new year.

Enjoy "Christmas Afternoon," a classic essay by Robert Benchley.

These three quizzes have been adapted from Dmitri Borgmann's classic collection of "curiosities involving letters and words" in Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities (Scribner's, 1965). If any of the questions leave you puzzled, take a peek at the Answers to Word Games for the Holidays.

I. Reversals
Level of difficulty: easy
A word that reads the same backward and forward is called a palindrome. However, if reading a word backward produces a different word, we have what's known as a reversal or an inversion. Thus the word pairs mug-gum, star-rats, and devil-livid are examples of reversals.

Here are 10 pairs of definitions, each of which corresponds to a pair of reversals. Each word contains six letters. (An asterisk indicates either a hyphenated word or a two-word term.) Your job is to identify the reversals.

1. (a) Knives, forks, and _____.
   (b) Pries in a sneaking or meddlesome manner.


2. (a) Committed an offense or fault.
   (b) _____ the Menace


3. (a) Single-masted, rigged sailing vessels.
   (b) Small cylinders on which thread or yarn is wound.


4. (a) To cause to grow together again.
   (b) An itinerant mender of household utensils.


5. (a) One who refuses to grant something.
   (b) Checked or halted a horse.


6. (a) Fills with resolution or determination.
   (b) Frozen or partly frozen forms of rain.


7. (a) Children in school.
   (b) To make a mistake.*


8. (a) To laugh (a slang term).*
   (b) Marked by the enthusiastic expression of college spirit.*


9. (a) Diversions or pastimes.
   (b) Leather bands for sharpening razors.


10. (a) A 10-dollar bill.
    (b) A substance that curdles milk.

II. Bewildering Beheadments
Level of difficulty: challenging
Beheadment (or, more technically, apheresis) involves the removal of the first letter of a word (such as the c from climb), leaving in its place another complete word (limb). In this game, removal of the initial letter creates a new word that has essentially the same meaning as the original word. For example, if we remove the initial a from alone--which means "solitary"--we're left with lone, which also means "solitary." Though the word loses a letter, its basic definition is unchanged.

In each of these 10 bewildering beheadments, we give you the definition of the word, which applies equally well before and after beheadment, followed by the number of letters in the word, again both before and after. All you have to do is identify the words.

1. A four-footed mammal. (3,2)
2. These are associated with, but not part of, the face. (5,4)
3. To move in a careless or headlong manner. (7,6)
4. To make a low, heavy, rolling sound. (7,6)
5. Related by blood. (4,3)
6. A sharp point. (5,4)
7. A bird. (4,3)
8. The husband of one's aunt. (6,5)
9. A mild oath. (4,3)
10. To move in a leisurely or aimless fashion. (6,5)

III. Nonpareil Nonpatterns
Level of difficulty: hard
A word that uses no letter of the alphabet more than once is known as a nonpattern word (or, more generally, an isogram). Conjugatively, for instance, is a nonpattern word that uses one-half of the alphabet--13 letters. Collected here are 10 nonpattern words of 13, 14, or 15 letters. We provide the definitions of the words and specify (in parenthesis) the number of letters in each. Your job is to identify the words, most of which are a tad unusual.

1. Having numerous offshoots or boughs. (13)
2. Subserviently, obediently, submissively. (13)
3. Unperceivably, unascertainably. (14)
4. In a versatile manner, unusually skillfully. (14)
5. Acts of causing civil disorder or public unrest. (14)
6. Spuriously imaginary or fictitious. (14)
7. Not subject to being protected by copyright. (15)
8. Not subject to being demonstrated as false. (13)
9. Acts of transforming streets into boulevards. (13)
10. Pertaining to both water and air. (14)

Stop back next Monday, December 28, for another collection of word games for the holidays.

The Lighter Side of Language:

• Simpsons, Sopranos, and SNOOTS
• Ghost Poop, Woozies, and Foochacha: Family Slang
• 200 Store Name Puns

When it comes to descriptive writing, I'm a sucker for a good list--any playful hodgepodge of dizzying details that can stir a person or place to life through sheer excess and exuberance. Like Jean Shepherd's description of a boy dressed to confront a northern Indiana winter:

Preparing to go to school was about like getting ready for extended Deep-Sea Diving. Longjohns, corduroy knickers, checkered flannel Lumberjack shirt, four sweaters, fleece-lined leatherette sheepskin, helmet, goggles, mittens with leatherette gauntlets and a large red star with an Indian Chief's face in the middle, three pairs of sox, high-tops, overshoes, and a sixteen-foot scarf wound spirally from left to right until only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing told you that a kid was in the neighborhood.
("Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid")

And when that same boy visits a department store Toyland, Shepherd shows how a good list can bring a scene to life with sounds as well as sights and smells:

Over the serpentine line roared a great sea of sound: tinkling bells, recorded carols, the hum and clatter of electric trains, whistles tooting, mechanical cows mooing, cash registers dinging, and from far off in the faint distance the "Ho-ho-ho-ing" of jolly old Saint Nick.

(If these sight and sound images strike you as familiar, consider this: the boy's name is Ralphie, and back in 1983 Shepherd's vivid descriptions--from the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash--were translated into the cinematic images of A Christmas Story.)

Though lists may appear to be rather artless, haphazard affairs, Robert Belknap insists that they are often "deliberate structures, built with care and craft." In his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (Yale University Press, 2004), Belknap shows how writers have relied on lists throughout literary history: the catalog of ships in Homer's Iliad, the record of "schoolboy treasures" in Tom Sawyer's pockets, the inventory of America in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Lists have a role to play in essays and compositions as well--especially those that describe people or places or things. See, for instance, how Alfred Kazin relied on lists to describe "The Kitchen" of his childhood.

Drawing up lists can help us generate materials for a composition (see Discovery Strategy: Probing Your Topic). Lists can also serve as a way to arrange and connect ideas and images, as shown in our Model Place Descriptions. According to Belknap, lists may "compile a history, gather evidence, order and organize phenomena, present an agenda of apparent formlessness, and express a multiplicity of voices and experiences."

Like any rhetorical device, list structures can be overworked. Too many of them will soon exhaust a reader's patience. But used selectively and structured thoughtfully, lists can be downright fun--why, even more fun than an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle!

And with a list, you won't shoot your eye out, kid.

More About Lists:

• Writing with Lists
• Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There
• Ian Frazier's List of Reasons in Great Plains
• Lists and Anaphora in Nikki Giovanni's "View of Home"

Image: Peter Billingsley as Ralphie in A Christmas Story, © Warner Brothers, 1984.

1. Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.


2. The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.


3. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.


4. Use the right word, not its second cousin.


5. You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.


6. As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.


7. Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.


8. Damnation (if you will allow the expression), get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls. . . . There is one thing I can't stand and won't stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality.


9. Use good grammar.


10. Use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

Sources:
_{1. "Mark Twain's General Reply" 2. Mark Twain's Notebook: 1902-1903 3. Quoted by Rudyard Kipling in From Sea to Sea (1899) 4. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895) 5. Letter to Orion Clemens (March 1878) 6. Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) 7. source unknown 8. Letter to Will Bowen (1876) 9. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895) 10. Letter to D. W. Bowser (March 1880)}

Essays by Mark Twain:

• Advice to Youth
• Corn-Pone Opinions
• A Fable
• Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
• On the Decay of the Art of Lying
• Two Ways of Seeing a River

Image: Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), 1835-1910