Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Logophilia!

Carrying forward from my previous post (and thanks to a comment by an anon appreciator), I thought I will put forth some interesting trivia which I came across in different forms of literature. Needless to say, the interesting stuff is related to wordplays(mostly anagrams) again as indicated by the title of this post and I've tried to post only what I found out independently, but where the case seems extraordinarily strong, I've included externally referred ones as well :


1) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosophers's Stone by JK Rowling
The 'Mirror of Erised' is a play on the word Desire. It literally means to 'mirror' "erised' into our eyes, i.e. if we mirror it, we are in a way "reversing it back"..meaning Erised reverses itself to Desire. Rightly so, it reflected one's deepest desires/wishes as explained by Dumbledore in the book. It could work well as a crossie clue in fact, a simple one at that.

The most famous wordplay in the whole series is of course "Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort" which I hear has given many translators a headache! I will obviously not name the spells which derive a lot from Latin and of course English.

2) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown :
Needless to say, this book had infinite codes decoded but I'll try and have a look at ones which I found have been left purposely undeciphered.

One of them is Robert Langdon's editor's name : Jonas Faukman. Interestingly, Dan Brown has managed to get his own editor's name anagrammed individually and made him a part of the book. Brown's editor's name : Jason Kaufman!

Another trivia which I picked up from the news is the name of Sir Leigh Teabing : Which is apparently an anagram of Baigent and Leigh, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (a very interesting and eye-opening book I must admit)

3) This one was totally an unexpected one and I don't know if the film-makers made it intentionally. In the movie, Ratatouille, the celebrity chef is known by the name of Auguste Gusteau. Not until I checked up the IMDB, did I realize that the Auguste was spelt with an 'e' at the end. If we see carefully, Auguste and Gusteau are anagrams of each other!

4) This one I'm not sure if I've come across in the TFE earlier, but also struck me independently while going through the wiki page for the movie "October Sky". Apparently, the movie is inspired by a book called "Rocket Boys". You would have guessed by now that "October Sky" is an anagram of "Rocket Boys"!!

5) Another one which I picked up on the net and couldnt resist posting here. Paul McCartney's album "Memory almost full" is an anagram of "For my soulmate LLM" where LLM fits the initials of Linda Louise McCartney, his deceased wife. Still unsure whether it was intended again. If it was,

6) This was an original : Shashi Tharoor Tweets == Oh, he sorta writes trash! :D Composed just for the sheer fun of mocking Tharoor's joblessness and nonsensical sense of diplomacy.

Will try and continue when I come across more such ones. Adios for now

5 comments:

Santosh a.k.a Shiny said...

In no. 5. Finish the sentence... if it was, what would you do? :)

Much better post, with all short sentences. And also very interesting. Keep it going...

Mr. I said...

@ Shiny : you seem verrrrry vetti da, reading my blog (although I dont mind!) .. i realized that I had used the triangle brackets "<" to write "bows to Sir Paul" like how one does on gtalk.. turns out the site accepts it as html comments :|

Thanks for being my first commenter on this post!

jimmy said...

omg! u shud do a phd :)

Mr. I said...

@jimmy : will do, will do, after telengana issues are resolved :P and i realised probably this is my best shot at one!

Thomas said...

In no. 5. Finish the sentence... if it was, what would you do? :) Much better post, with all short sentences. And also very interesting. Keep it going...