#wordplay

Ashok(অশোক)ashokmandal
2025-11-23
2025-11-23

A #rebus is a #wordplay #puzzle combining images and letters to represent a word or phrase.

Words are represented by combinations of pictures and letters; for instance, "apex" might be represented by a picture of an ape followed by a letter X.

Moving left to right "say" the images in English and mix in the letters to complete the answer.

Read and reveal the rebus.

Described right to left for some bit of obscurity,

"ER" added
a brown paper bag
a dog with a collar and tag "fido"
a sedan car
Ashok(অশোক)ashokmandal
2025-11-23
Ashok(অশোক)ashokmandal
2025-11-23
2025-11-23

Embroidery #Wordplay is a #SundaySillies #wordsearch #puzzle with one answer. Start with one of the letters with a gray background and move to the next letter, but only horizontal or vertical from where you start. No diagonals - each square just once.

Use DM or CW for answers to let everyone enjoy the search!

Starting with one of the letters in a
gray square, find the longest word.
Next letter horizontal or vertical from
the first. No diagonals.
No square may be used again.
Minimum 7 letters

Embroidery Wordplay
a one-word word search puzzle

hint: next
difficulty: medium

Letter grid:
S N O E*
L E I X
L* A T T
O P A R


letters marked with an asterisk indicate the potential starting points for the word. The image shows them with a gray background.
Ashok(অশোক)ashokmandal
2025-11-23
2025-11-23

#SundaySillies
Wicked Wonderful Wordies - #wordplay #wordies #idiom

Happy weekend from here, #puzzle fans!

Idioms or common phrases (American/English) are represented by the position, shape or arrangement of words in or around the puzzle frame.

Can you figure out this week's wordie? It would be wicked wonderful if you can.

Please use CW to submit your answers, thanks. Give everybody the chance to guess.

Hint: make the most of it

Created with the Free Software SVG editor #Inkscape

Wicked Wonderful Wordies 
a visual idiom puzzle
------------------------------
description

Large, rounded black letters write out "sun" in the frame's center.
White, smaller letters appear across the middle of the larger word: "m", "o", "m", "e", "n", "t".
------------------------------
Explanation:
Typically, some kind of text is arranged inside, or somewhere around a square frame. The arrangement can be significant, and might be the key to recognizing the idiom. 

The puzzle can be difficult to solve because the idiom or common phrase may not be common to the person trying to solve the puzzle.

Sometimes there is an "AhHa!" moment, though.

Answers and an archive of the puzzles is available at http://runeman.org/wordies.
2025-11-20

Why, I ask myself (and you), is ‘sweeping’ used metaphorically to mean all-encompassing, wholesale, indiscriminate?

Like ‘sweeping reforms of the asylum system’ or whatnot.

Sweeping isn’t any of those things when I do it. It’d be better if sweeping meant ‘doing an average job but leaving a small percentage behind, enough that it won’t look done to anyone who looks carefully’.

#SomewhatRandomMusings #wordplay

And I’m like, Quotative ‘like’ isn’t just for quoting

One of the most noticeable changes in modern everyday English usage is the ascent of like in its various guises. Last week Michael Rundell at Macmillan Dictionary Blog briefly surveyed the development, noting that the word’s relatively recent use in reporting direct speech – known as quotative like – is “widely disliked by traditionalists”.

There are various reasons for the aversion. Any usage that becomes suddenly popular will attract criticism. Frequent use of like is also perceived as lazy, or associated with triviality. Facebook likes, filler likes (So, like, OK), and hedging or approximating likes (He was like six feet) serve only to underline how ubiquitous the word has become.

Some, like the Acadamy of Linguistic Awarness [sic], revile this state of affairs:

Others take pride in it:

Like is like soooo divisive, and quotative like in particular is often misunderstood. If you search online for hate the word like or some such string, you’ll find plenty of knee-jerk antipathy to it that largely assumes its synonymity with said. That is, there’s a common misconception that I was like, [X] = I said, [X]. But often this is not the case, about which more shortly.

First, it’s worth noting that those of us who use quotative like use it in a range of tenses, for example past (She was like, “Let me know”), historical present (So last week he’s like, “Are we ready yet?” and we’re all like, “Yes!”), and future (If that happens I’ll be like, “Uh-oh.”).

This use of like, reporting direct speech more or less, became very popular in recent times with young people especially, though far from exclusively, establishing itself as a normal usage – even a dominant one in some groups. But with quotative like we can do more than simply report speech: we may convey an interaction with expansive social and performative detail.

As Jessica Love observed in the American Scholar a couple of years ago, quotative like

encourages a speaker to embody the participants in a conversation. Thus, the speaker vocalizes the contents of participants’ utterances, but also her attitudes toward those utterances. She can dramatize multiple viewpoints, one after another, making it perfectly clear all the while which views she sympathizes with and which she does not.

Quotative like has also undergone striking developments on the internet. Some users of social media are typing “I’m like” (or “I’m all like”, etc.) and following it with an image or image macro. It’s a meme-friendly playground of creativity in which the images themselves are being embedded in the syntax.

Here are some examples with text:

And some without text:

Offline we might say I’m like and make a caricatured facial expression; online, we use images instead to communicate those staged reactions. These funny, often self-deprecating tweets use instantly interpretable images to substitute for (and expand upon) those physical gestures, expressions, and body language that accompany ordinary speech but are difficult or impossible to replicate online.

Last month the NY Times quoted Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, who believes

This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment . . . [and] turning photography into a communication medium.

And not just photography but image macros, TV and film stills, comics, animated gifs, the whole gamut of shortform visual data we’ve been incorporating into online discourse. (Jessica Love has also pondered the possibilities of a language based on real-time images.) Who’s to say what will emerge from this hybrid domain?

Quotative like can set up a whole miniature drama, with visual content contributing to a richer vocabulary than words alone could license. Online and off, used with images or micro-performances, quotative like is not a lazy crutch of semi-literate teens but a handy and highly functional addition to our lexicon – and to our paralinguistic repertoire. No wonder it has caught on.

And I’m all like

Updates:

In ‘The Internet is a James Joyce Novel‘, Jessica Love at the American Scholar picks up on this post and ponders the spread of captioned images qua memes and their communicative uses:

[L]ike it or not, memes are playing an increasingly prominent role in public discourse. . . . The increasing ease with which we can combine language and pictures will only lead to further innovations.

From an excellent post by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log, December 2006:

[T]eenagers have been fond of discourse-particle uses of like for quite some time, at least 50 years; some people now in their 50s and 60s still use like this way. Meanwhile, quotative like has risen in 25 or 30 years to become the dominant quotative in the speech of young people (and some older speakers use it too). The result is that some young people are indeed heavy users of like in functions that some of their elders do not use it in. And many of these older speakers are annoyed as hell about that.

Zwicky further explores the sociolinguistic aspects of like, confirming its usefulness and examining why exactly some people dislike it so much. He finds that:

discourse-particle and quotative like have both linguistic value (they can be used to convey nuances of meaning) and social value (they’re part of the way personas and social-group memberships are projected).

Steven Poole reminded me of his post at Unspeak a few years ago taking Christopher Hitchens to task for a shallow denigration of quotative like:

he was like and he said do not actually mean the same thing; and Hitchens is like, I do not approve of this youthspeak that I have not made sufficient efforts to understand?

Mercedes Durham told me of research she and colleagues did on the “Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of ‘be like’” (PDF).

They report on two studies of “change in social and linguistic effects on be like usage and acceptability”, and find “no evidence of change in linguistic constraints on be like [e.g., speaker age, tense, quote content] as it has diffused into U.K. and U.S. Englishes”.

Another development: ‘Like’ is an infix now, which is un-like-believably innovative.

#electronicCommunication #grammar #imageMacros #internet #internetCulture #language #languageChange #like #linguistics #memes #photography #pragmatics #slang #speech #syntax #twitter #wordplay #words

2025-11-20

NYT Connections is a puzzle where you group 16 words into four themed sets from easy to hardest. For 20 Nov, the answers were:

FIX, PASTE, PLASTER, STICK (adhere)
BRUSH, KISS, SKIM, STROKE (graze)
CROWN, ENAMEL, PULP, ROOT (tooth parts)
ANY, ARTY, DECAY, ESSAY (sound like letters)

#NYTConnections #WordGame #DailyPuzzle #BrainTeaser #PuzzleHints #WordPlay #TECHi

Read Full Article Here :- techi.com/today-nyt-connection

Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николовvnikolov@ieji.de
2025-11-18

SI·SAPIS
SIS·APIS

#Latin
#WordPlay

Oh, you are fascinated? What are you now, fascinist‽

#badjokes #wordplay

Mark B Tomlinsonmbt3d@graphics.social
2025-11-17

If you want clean code you should use a German Seife.

This one is going to have a limited audience no doubt.
For those confused I'll clarify later...

#TechJoke #Deutsch #wordplay

2025-11-16

A #rebus is a #wordplay #puzzle combining images and letters to represent a word or phrase.

Words are represented by combinations of pictures and letters; for instance, "apex" might be represented by a picture of an ape followed by a letter X.

Moving left to right "say" the images in English and mix in the letters to complete the answer.

Read and Reveal the Rebus
described right to left to avoid too much info.

a blue button with four thread holes, "eee", a hand bell
Ashok(অশোক)ashokmandal
2025-11-16
Ashok(অশোক)ashokmandal
2025-11-16
2025-11-16

Embroidery #Wordplay is a #SundaySillies #wordsearch #puzzle with one answer. Start with one of the letters with a gray background and move to the next letter, but only horizontal or vertical from where you start. No diagonals - each square just once.

Use DM or CW for answers to let everyone enjoy the search!

Starting with one of the letters in a
gray square, find the longest word.
Next letter horizontal or vertical from
the first. No diagonals.
No square may be used again.
Minimum 7 letters

Embroidery Wordplay
a one-word word search puzzle

hint: beyond
difficulty: medium

Letter grid:
N A L Y
O I I S
P* T T M
E C X E*

letters marked with an asterisk indicate the potential starting points for the word. The image shows them with a gray background.
2025-11-16

#SundaySillies
Wicked Wonderful Wordies - #wordplay #wordies #idiom

Happy weekend from here, #puzzle fans!

Idioms or common phrases (American/English) are represented by the position, shape or arrangement of words in or around the puzzle frame.

Can you figure out this week's wordie? It would be wicked wonderful if you can.

Please use CW to submit your answers, thanks. Give everybody the chance to guess.

Hint: hurry
Created with the Free Software SVG editor #Inkscape

Wicked Wonderful Wordies 
a visual idiom puzzle
------------------------------
description
The word "living' rests on the word "borrowed time" in the center of the puzzle frame.
------------------------------
Explanation:
Typically, some kind of text is arranged inside, or somewhere around a square frame. The arrangement can be significant, and might be the key to recognizing the idiom. 

The puzzle can be difficult to solve because the idiom or common phrase may not be common to the person trying to solve the puzzle.

Sometimes there is an "AhHa!" moment, though.

Answers and an archive of the puzzles is available at http://runeman.org/wordies.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst