A Cone Ocean Canoe

Take all the letters in the word silent, rearrange them, and you can come up with the word listen. Similarly, earth can become heart, and whenever you’re stressed, you might eat more desserts.

These are called anagrams, a word that traces back to ancient Greece, although the idea of rearranging characters in a word certainly goes back much further. The first part of the word, ana-, meant something like back or again. Think about how an anachronism travels back in time, or how an analogy sort of goes back over the logic.

Gramma, the main body of the word, meant something like a written character. By adding that ana- prefix, the Greeks described the sort of wordplay that the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Sumerians had been doing for a thousand years or more, but the sophisticated Greek alphabet allowed them to take the game much further.

Two-word anagrams are even more fun.

A dormitory is very commonly a dirty room. Astronomers, aptly, might be thought of as their anagram: moon starers. One of my favorite two-word anagrams is the way The Morse Code spells out here come dots.

Bigger phrases get even more fun, like the one I’m using for today’s title:

a cone ocean canoe

Ocean and canoe are single-word anagrams, whereas “a cone” splits either word into two new ones.

Even my own user name—goatfury—makes a great potential anagram. Rearranging these letters may be hazardous to your health: you might get caught in a gout fray and need to visit a hospital as a result.

Or, you might step onto the yoga turf at Revolution BJJ, where you take a class from one of our instructors. You might want to give Fay Grout a call if you need some work done around your bathtub, and I heart that Fray Auto has a really good deal on a gently used 1984 Ford Escort.

I’ve always been drawn to these sorts of letter games, at least as far back as I can remember (and as far back as pictures can remind me!). Here I am with a pile of presents that includes the iconic Fisher-Price Play Desk:

If you’re Gen X, there is a really good chance you played with this set. It came with a little blackboard strip and some chalk, so you could practice writing on a chalk board, and there were something akin to punch cards you could slide into the apparatus. You could then put the letters in the correct order into the card itself, so you could learn how to spell.

I am pretty confident that these letters helped me to begin playing with anagrams. After all, if you have physical letters right there, you’re going to play with those shapes (literally, in my case).

Do you remember any of these sorts of games you played as a kid? I’m reaching back as far as I can with my mind, and all the photos my parents saved are incredibly helpful. So is listening to music from my distant past, but I’m still coming up short on specific memories.

This was learning how to think, for me—at least some part of that giant puzzle, anyway—and I want to know exactly where the thinking me comes from.To that end, you’ll almost certainly read a lot more nostalgic stuff from me. Sorry for talking about myself so much, but I really have no idea how to do this any other way, and I think it’s worth the effort.

What about you? Do you remember any toys or games you played with from an early age that helped you figure out how to think?