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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Wednesday, November 11
Linguists take all aspects of language seriously, even the silly aspects. In 2003, Andrew Nevins and Bert Vaux undertook a study of the implicit rules involved in a phenomenon called shm-reduplication. What is shm-reduplication? Please answer in the form of an example.

Hint Your hint is in yesterday's puzzle.

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

You know how Cliffs Notes take complex works of literature and boil them down to simple summaries? Well, here's the opposite of that:

A pompous personage of reduplicative cognomen is insufficiently tenacious of a mural perch. Notwithstanding the intervention of a royal entourage—equids included!—ooclasm proves irremediable.

This is a highfalutin synopsis of what familiar children's rhyme?

Solution

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Fun fact: There's nothing in "Humpty Dumpty" to indicate that Humpty is an egg. It certainly makes sense if you think of the rhyme as a riddle, but the first person to interpret it this way seems to have been John Tenniel, illustrator of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, in which Humpty Dumpty memorably says "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

In the spirit of Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, I coined the word ooclasm for this very puzzle—from Greek roots oo- ('egg') and -clasm ('breaking'). Maybe that's cheating, but you can't make an omelet without ooclasm!

The cartoon at left isn't mine, but it's been posted so widely on the internet that I don't know whom to credit it to. Enjoy!

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Anna J., Jacob C., Leo S., Nico, Maddy, Jason, Kate, Zachary S., Graham, and Dr. Yetman. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

About This Site

Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."

Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.

Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to June 2020.