In Fun

Rearranging Zelophehad’s Daughters

Author ZiffPosted on 27 Comments

If you’ve visited recently, you may have noticed that elements of our sidebars have been moving around. We recently upgraded our WordPress installation, so Lynnette has been tidying everything up in the aftermath, when of course some plugins failed and now have to be replaced.

But rather than rearranging pieces of our blog, I’m thinking more about rearranging the letters in Zelophehad’s Daughters to see what words I could come up with. If you’ve made a resolution, as I have, to waste more time in 2009 than you did in 2008, you’ll immediately see the value of such an undertaking.

So I’ve fiddled around with Zelophehad’s Daughters, as well as the names of some other blogs I read most, to see what I could come up with. I’m not nearly good enough to do complete anagrams, where all the letters are used. Most of my solutions are just partial, leaving one or more letters out. Also, since I did these all manually, I’ve probably made errors, so please feel free to point them out.

Here are a few of my favorites:

By Common Consent (This is a difficult one, with only two unique vowels [not counting Y] and lots of duplicate letters.)

  • Comment boon (YCNS missing. A good description of BCC’s high comment level, though.)
  • “No comment” — COB (YNS missing. CoB is for “Church Office Building”. A bit of a stretch, but perhaps what Church officials would say if asked about BCC.)

The Exponent (I left the in to give me more to work with.)

  • Next: the peon (Complete.)
  • Potent hex (EN missing.)

Faith Promoting Rumor

  • Rip fat tumor mooring (H missing. Part of a doctor’s to-do list during a surgery: Rip fat tumor mooring. Rip skinny tumor mooring. Rip out tumor.)
  • Ruminator room (FIHPTG missing. This is my favorite anagram for any blog, because it describes FPR. It’s like a cozy room where very smart people ruminate about things I don’t understand, but I’m free to go listen any time.)
  • Ruminator group (FIHMOT missing. This is only possible if FPR changes the spelling of rumor to the British rumour.)

Feminist Mormon Housewives

  • Mess vomit for women (INISHUE missing. This is a riff on fMhLisa’s description of FMH as a place to put her “brain vomit.”)
  • Moms: sin foes with vim (NEEOUR missing)
  • Swift moose ruins Nome hive (M missing. A possible headline from a newspaper in Alaska?)

Juvenile Instructor

  • Joust venue (ILINRCTR missing. I love this one because it describes the argumentative nature of much Bloggernacle discussion. Not at JI, though, as far as I can see. They’re very civil.)
  • Cut, run! Evil in store! (J missing.)

Keepapitchinin (This title is a gold mine, with all those vowels and a good mix of consonants. You can make all kinds of common letter combinations like th and ch and ck and nk.)

  • cheap kin pie tin (Complete. This sounds like it should be some kind of pithy moral lesson, like you’re left with the empty pie tin if your relatives are too cheap to buy enough pie.)
  • Pith in peace, kin (Complete. This one sounds like a holiday good wish for a writer of aphorisms.)
  • hip/neck paint (EI missing. This could be a new product for athletes who have tired of merely painting their faces with anti-flash cream.)
  • Pint pace in hike (Complete. This could be part of a math story problem. Tom and William go for a hike while drinking pints of beer. Tom drinks 3 pints in the first 5 miles . . . Whose pint pace in the hike is greater?)

Millennial Star

  • All real mist inn (Complete. I am sick of staying at inns with fake mist, so this is a relief.)
  • Lil’ rat smile (NNA missing. Featured in the movie Ratatouille.)
  • Nail mill as rent (Complete. You know times are tough when you have to hand over your nail mill to your landlord in lieu of rent.)
  • Tell aim in snarl (Complete. This could appear on a list of suggestions in a class on assertiveness in business. When you present a business plan, don’t just tell your aim. Tell it with a snarl.)

Mormon Matters

  • Mon storm tamer (Complete. This is what you need after a Friday Firestorm has stirred up your weekend.)
  • Roman motes (MRT missing. Part of a new faith-promiting rumor. See, when Jesus talked about beams and motes in people’s eyes, he wasn’t just talking about any old motes. He was talking about Roman motes, which were common in his day, which were 1/100th the size of a typical mote. So he was really making the point about how the faults we see in others are small.)

Mormon Mentality

  • Moral entity (MONM missing. Sounds like a General Authority phrase that never quite caught on. “Never forget, young people, that each of you is a moral entity, free to make choices for yourself.”)
  • My moral tent (MONI missing. This is the tent in which I would never fornicate. Don’t ask me about the other one.)
  • Meaty Mormon lint (Complete. Because of our observence of the Word of Wisdom, Mormons’ belly button lint is far meatier than that of worldly people. Or so I’ve heard.)

Nine Moons (Again, a short name and not much to work with.)

  • Moose Inn (N missing. Moose turns up in a lot of blog names, I guess because it’s built out of common letters and it shares lots of letters with Mormon.)

Times and Seasons

  • Man eats son, dies. (Complete. A story in an anagram!)
  • Sad, mean snit (SOSE missing. This is the state of many Bloggernacle commenters, include me too often.)

Waters of Mormon

  • Mormon frat o’ sew (Complete. I know it’s cheating to use Mormon as-is, but I really liked this solution anyway. It’s the fraternity where everyone sews. The women will love the men who come out of it.)
  • Moose wart form (N missing. This is what you pour over a moose’s wart when you’re trying to make a tight-fitting covering for it so it isn’t painfully rubbed off on a tree.)

Zelophehad’s Daughters

  • Help us, God’s a hater! (ZEHD missing)
  • Hades’ halos (ZEPHDUGTER missing. I still like it. Perhaps I’ll lobby my co-bloggers to make it our tagline.)

Okay, enough from me. If you’re so inclined, please feel free to contribute full or partial anagrams for blog names in the comments. Or tell me which of mine you like or dislike.

27 comments

  4. Ardis, that is classic! Clearly you are much better than I am at this. Do you have any others?

    Thanks for the pointer, janeannechovy. I was vaguely aware that there were automatic generator programs, but I thought it might be more fun to try to come up with results by hand.

  5. “Joust venue”=awesome. Thanks for including JI in your bloggernacle anagraming. I like “Help us, God’s a hater!” for ZD and “‘No comment.’–COB” for BCC. This was fun.

  7. In your own preferential order or walk in the gospel … (with a leftover E)

    To grasp, laud, haze, shed

    enjoy wednesday.

  10. Or if the gentlemen at Juvenile Instructor enroll in the Mark Hofmann School of Manufactured History, we could request that they “just invent our relic.”

  12. This is fun, but the hidden commentary found in these anagrams makes me worried about my blog Feast Upon the Word, which generates “A Softened Throw Up.”

  13. Just so long as it’s softened, Brian! That sounds like it belongs somewhere in FMH’s poop chronicles.

    Ardis, thanks for the further anagrams. These are great! I had no idea that the JI group was forging money or artifacts, for that matter. I’ll have to keep a closer eye on them.

  14. Perhaps even more disturbingly, Brian, Feast Upon the Word becomes he wasted tofu porn. Now I’m not sure exactly what tofu porn is, but I suspect that it unashamedly shows naked tofu like this, and it pains me to think of such a thing being wasted.

  15. I checked and you can’t get “multiple mortal probations” from “new cool thang,” which is disappointing. These were the best I could see

    Lance Thong. Ow!
    Clean Thong. Wo!

    My favorite from the post is: My moral tent (MONI missing. This is the tent in which I would never fornicate. Don’t ask me about the other one.) Nicely done.

  16. Ziff, I am too ashamed to respond. I can’t believe all these years I’ve been wasting tofu p^rn. {sob}

    Jacob: “you can’t get “multiple mortal probations” from “new cool thang,”” Don’t let the evidence stop you from trying! (/snark)

  17. Jacob, I’m disappointed to hear that. But, if you’re willing to put up with an obscure interpretation, you can convert New Cool Thang into go two channel (i.e., two lives) with no letters left over.

    Also what cologne! (N left over) or hew a long cot (N left over–part of instructions for an obscure Boy Scout merit badge that requires one to hew complete pieces of furniture out of a single block of wood).

    sister blah 2, sorry your comment got caught in the spam filter. I loved A godhead pretzel, shush! It sounds like something that should be said during an argument about the trinity. “Well I don’t believe in a godhead pretzel like you apparently do! (sniff)”

  19. Ardis and Ziff (#10, 11, & 13):

    We have only forged a couple of relics and tried to sell them, but who can blame us? Only one of the twelve permas at JI has a full time job (congrats to Taysom on his recent tenure track position), and the rest of us are just trying to get through grad school with minimum debt. Is it so wrong to forge a few documents and relics and sell them in an effort to leave grad school debt free?

    BTW, my new favorite for Zelophehad’s Daughters is “Gods Haled Hutzpah Seer.”

  20. Good point, Christopher. Perhaps Uncle Sam could cut out the middle man and just let you forge relics in lieu of paying off student loans. Certainly I wish a similar option were available for statistics. I could forge a few stats and be debt-free in no time!

    Mark, thanks for Zelph had a stud. Did you do that by hand? I can’t imagine an anagram generator would recognize Zelph as a word.

    Mary, thanks. That sounds like it should be part of a poem. It’s good to see you commenting here!

  21. Thanks, chanson. I’m hopelessly behind the times. I make my anagrams by hand. Also, I’m typing this on a stone keyboard.

    By the way, Main Street Plaza also yields a whole bunch of fun rearrangements, including:

    a “Mister Planet” (AZ missing. This is how a message would begin for someone who missed a call from Clark Kent of the Daily Planet when the message taker mistook the newspaper name for the caller’s name.)

    In a Pez alarm test (Complete. The beginning of a set of safety instructions that includes lines like “keep your head down, and watch for flying candy.”)

    Rent a split maze (A missing. This is what you’re told when you want to race a pair of rats against each other.)

    Tame zeal in parts. (Complete. A good piece of advice for the overly zealous.)

  22. A few more for ZD:

    the zealous sap gap (HHDDSER missing. What happens when you don’t have enough zealous saps.)

    zeal groped shade huts (H missing. Give me any kind of shade huts, just not those ones that were groped with zeal.)

    She ought dare lead. (ZPHS missing. A good feminist message.)

    Shepherds had zeal. (OUGT missing. Maybe this is why they made it to see baby Jesus even when all the other people the angels appeared to got tired and gave up.)

  24. I ran the anagram program for my personal blog (“The Things of My Soul”). My favorite was:

    “Heftily Thongs Sumo”

    That image . . .

  25. Arghh, my post got eaten.

    I liked:

    Thesis I

    And for Mormon Matters:

    Ranter Mom Most
    Tame Morn Storm
    Smarter Mom Not
    Mammons Retort
    Momma Torrents
    Marmots Mentor

    And for ZD over 5000 complete anagrams exist, including:

    A Godhead Pretzel Shush
    A Heralded Zest Hug Hops
    … many with the term redhead …
    and
    A Shaded Hope Hertz Lugs

    Very obscure, obviously 😉

  26. Gods Haled Hutzpah Seer

    I like that.

    Not to mention,

    Lance Thong. Ow!
    Clean Thong. Wo!

    Made me laugh

    I need more letters in Ethesis, obviously.

    These Is
    and
    She Ties

    Just don’t cut in this competition.

    Thanks for the smiles.

  27. Something about word humor really strikes my funny bone. Ray, the heftily thonged sumo really got me. A softened throw up was pretty good too.

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