100 YEARS OLD AND STILL PLAYING WORD GAMES...
SAUNTERING in leisurely style down to brunchfast on Saturday around noon, I was settling down to my habitual cross between breakfast and brunch when my polar bear sidled over. “Let’s play a game,” he said ominously.
My bear’s company at brunchfast is always intellectually stimulating, indeed it was he who originally coined the word for a meal that is distinctly more than breakfast but not quite lunchy enough to be brunch. On this occasion however my brain had not sufficiently woken up for one of his games and I told him so.
“Oh come on,” he encouraged me, “this is an easy one,” and he explained the rules.
“All we have to do,” he said, “is come up with words for which the second half is the alphabetical mirror reflection of the first half.”
“What?” I asked blearily. “What’s an alphabetical mirror reflection?”
“Z is the alphabetical reflection of A; B and Y are alphabetical reflections, and so on,” he explained. “Boy,” I said. “Has, Got, His, Cox.” “No,” he said shaking his massive head. “While I’d agree that G and T are mirror pairs as are H and S, and C and X, I can’t let you put your mirror in the middle of a letter, even if the righthand sides of A, O and I are reflections of the left-hand sides, they aren’t alphabetical reflections.”
“Polk,” I said. “He was President of the USA, you know.”
“I know,” he agreed. “But we don’t allow proper names.”
“Vole,” I said triumphantly. Then I added, “Grit, girt. Wold, wird.” “Wird?” he queried. “The OED gives five definitions of wird,” I said, authoritatively, “though I mist admit they are all somewhat medieval.”
“Can’t you do better than four letters?” he said challengingly.
“Hmm,” I hmmed. “Well you can’t have five letters, as that runs into the alphabetical mirror letter-cutting problem again.” I sank into deep thought during which the bear ate my kippers to prevent their getting cold. Then with a sudden burst of inspiration I shouted out “Wizard!” so loudly that the whole room turned to look at me in surprise. “Hovels!” I added as an encore. “Zorila,” said the bear calmly. “That’s not a word,” I said, “what’s ‘zorila’ meant to mean?”
“It’s a cross between a zombie and a gorilla,” he said.
“Nonsense,” I insisted. “A gorilla has a double-L and I see no reason to lose one of them when crossing it with a zombie. I suggest that you have failed to match my six-letter words and I have consequently won the game.”
The polar bear then rose from his chair, stretched to his full height, plonked his huge paws on the table, looked me straight in the eye and said, triumphantly, “I have an eight-letter alphabetical mirror image word.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “What is this word?”
“Zoorilla,” he said. “And before you ask, it’s a gorilla that is kept in a zoo,” and he ambled off to get more kippers. We shall not play that game again.