Anagram
Again, to stave off dwelling on the recent death of a loved one, I find solace in the simple combinations of letters and the immaculate clarity of their funny outcomes. There's a fog of memory with anagrams, I am sure at some point before the age of six or seven when all kids clamor to grasp the full meanings of the alphabet some teacher or another taught us kids this fun rainy-day trick. Maybe we had an old typewriter that would make the nice click-clack-ding noises as we'd all pluck the keys in hopes of discovering a new meaning to our names. I'd forgotten about these Anagrams completely until recently flipping through a collection of Nabokov's stories. Always the typographical trickster, genius of grammar, and lover of words and their play, he embedded a downright impossible Acrostic (the big, brilliant brother of the anagram) in the last paragraph of his story The Vane Sisters.
Without an old typewriter to play with currently, I'm left to the internet to fill the void and thankfully there are several Anagram-Makers contained within which do all the work for me. Here are several funny examples made of the letters of my first and last name (punctuation added for clarity):
Mania, Born Dry
Bad Rainy Morn
Bard: Any Minor
Drab Irony, Man
Brainy Man Rod
The last one is particularily funny, in a childish way --- which is a great way to be funny when in the depths of a somewhat deep sea of oddly floating memories which seem to mix with invented imaginings and the various other feelings tied closely with loss. A good stupid laugh at a very simple thing. Anagrams just might be more helpful than pharmaceuticals. Having found a few good ones with my own name, I entered in the letters of my Dear's first and last name and came up with several more laughs as well as an absolutely priceless one:
Erratic Thirst In:
Retract Thin Iris (this is the one! glorious!)
Irritants Tic Her
Air-Thin Critters
And, a good friend's first and last combine to make some wonderful anagrams as well:
Call Sins Om
Calm In Loss
Calms Loins
So:
What are some funny anagrams of your name?
Footnote:
The Wikipedia article linked to "The Vane Sisters" above states:
"Since acrostics play a prominent role in this short story, Italian Nabokovian scholar Matteo Baccani points out that the sisters’ surname, Vane, hints at the author’s initials, as its pronunciation (/vein/) sounds quite like the name of "v" and "n" in Cyrillic alphabet ("ve" and "en"). This is even more evident in the novel "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle" (1969), in which the protagonist’s surname is patently "Veen"
No mention of the fact that fictional text of Ada or Ardor is handled by the same woman who collaborated with little Lolita's Claire Quilty on several of his fictional-fictional works: Vivian Darkbloom --- an anagram of the Real Life author's own first and last name. Enjoy.
