Colloquy.

Ed Wolpow writes "Nice to see the elementary names once again in Word Ways. Two improvements are possible for the transadditions list (discovered with the help of the Franklin Crossword Puzzle Solver): ALUMINUM transadds to NUMMULARIA, and HAFNIUM to HUMANIFY." He notes that Webster's Third lists additional variant names for elements such as ALABAMINE, MASURIUM, VIRGINIUM, EKA-CESIUM and DVI-MANGANESE, not to mention the well-known QUICKSILVER. Of these words MASURIUM transadds to MARSUPIUM.

Jeremy Morse offers the following coinages to fill Darryl Francis's gaps:

KURCHATOVIUM Tchaikovsky's church music

MENDELEVIUM eleven medium [a shoe size]

JOLIOTIUM majority in council [Byron, 1 Foscari, I, 1,370]

RUTHERFORDIUM mid-fourth quarter [economic jargon]

UNNILHEXIUM four million six hundred

UNNILPENTIUM multiple punning

UNNILQUADIUM unqualified bunkum [how some readers may classify these offerings!]

However, Susan Thorpe in "More Elementary Improvements" elsewhere in this issue has supplied actual transadditions for four of these!

Writes Anil "I especially liked the Meaningful Offspring article which, unremarked, included several pairs that were cognates of the parent word, a few of which I had already noted in my anagram studies. I was also amused, in her Shifts progress article, to find that meaningless word play can turn up hidden truths: in prime number shifts (page 14) she exposed a not-so-well-kept secret (see page 42) that ANIL shifts to LAZE! (Shiftless, actually.)"

The Ibar River in Serbia, mentioned in "An Alphabet Reversal Verse", unfortunately does not run clear--it is contaminated by runoff from a huge waste pile belonging to a former lead processing plant!

Rex Gooch fills in holes in "Enlarging English Tautonyms" with NIMA place names: ManaQ or PapaQ, RoroF or TataF or ZazaF, TomatomaX, XhaxhaJ or MamaJ or NanaJ; AnbarQanbar or NaQna or UeQue, NiZni or HoZho (name of a Navaho god). The Tomatomax discovery is especially nice, located under tailor 6a in the OED, in an 1888 quote citing the bluefish (Yomatomax Saltatrix).

Oops! In "Selfish, Selfless, and Equable Words" divisibilite and invisibilitie should have been classified as 5 x i. In "Enlarging English Tautonyms" replace BERIBERIC with ERBER, and BRERE with SUPERSUPERB. Anil noted both of these goofs.

Responding to Raymond Love's Feb 2006 Colloquy question [Will Anil accept any of the following combinations of synonymic verbs to form one noun that is not synonymic: see/saw, down/fall, eye/witness, drum/beat?], Anil replies: "They fit the recipe in a sense, but they all have weaknesses. I liked see/saw best but the two halves are not synonyms, merely forms of the same word. The other three pairs form nouns whose meanings I'd take to be the same as the verbs except for part of speech. That is, aren't fall, witness and beat also nouns that mean essentially the same as their longer words--downfall, eyewitness, drumbeat? I offer a new example, bomb/shell. I refer of course to the figurative senses of bombshell as a high-impact surprise or an unusually attractive woman (figuratively speaking)."

Joli Quentin Kansil writes "I enjoyed the November 2005 issue as it paid tribute to Dmitri Borgmann, whom I corresponded with avidly in the 1960s and 1970s. I think I may have told you before that I 'almost' met him. This was [before 1973, when Dmitri moved to Dayton]. We talked on the phone and made an exact time and date for meeting when I came to Chicago. I took either a local train or cab to his place and rang the bell--no answer. I tried calling. No answer. Only later did I find out that he met no one in his later years. Why then, did he confirm our appointment to meet me? Perhaps, he really did want to meet me, but got cold feet at the last hour? I'll never know, but I took it personally and chose not to correspond with him any more."

Jeff Grant writes "I see Michael Helsem has posted a joky definition for ANTELARITY [a coinage in Jeff's 10-square in the Nov 1995 Word Ways] on a neologisms website."

Rex Gooch writes regarding "The Best Ten-Squares" in this issue: "The big breakthrough I made was to understand what was needed to make a 10-square, or, for that matter, any other size of square. That's why you saw some perfect 9-squares, a shot at 11-squares, but will not see any attempt at 12-squares. I had seen the very slow progress over many years of a number of people, and despite being pushed, would not start on a task I could not finish. I would not keep piling in words, then running a program in the hope of finding a square. When I was finally ready, I set things up so that I would have a good number of squares in a reasonable amount of time. To get to this point involved a lot of trials using Chris Long's formula with different sets of words (and a great deal of typing!). So finally I knew that I could get pure placename squares, but there was not the slightest chance of getting a headword square. For the first time, someone was confident of exactly what was needed for any size of square, and (in particular) knew exactly why Ted Clarke's approach could not succeed.

"As you comment on this in your last paragraph, let me be explicit. Roughly, the Oxford English Dictionary has 500,000 headwords, or 50,000 10-letter headwords. To get one or two squares would need 250,000, i.e. another 100 volumes! Not the slightest chance, even if we allow derived and variant forms. Adding Collins, Chambers, Webster's and Funk & Wagnalls hardly makes any dent in the problem. Moreover, if the English language adds 5000 words (500 10-letter words) per year, we need 400 years like this!"