Remember the old song from Bee Gees, ‘It’s only words, and words are all I have, to take your heart away…’ Yes, words are indeed magical. Communication amongst each other largely helped the prehistoric human beings to climb up the evolutionary tree.
Speaking of communications, there are essentially two kinds of it: verbal, and the other non-verbal. The modern world uses both forms of communication effectively to convey their feelings.
However, the verbal form of communication uses speech to describe their various kinds of feelings. Speech is the vocal form of communication that humans have been using since times immemorial. The trailing aspect of speech is all about language.
Forming a kind of communicative speech in any language requires a string of words juxtaposed in such a way to form sense to the listener in front.
Speech and Words
Language has been lingering in human civilization since its early days. The origin of language cannot be traced in history, primarily because the existence of language has been even before the practice of written records started. There is a mythological perspective on the existence of language.
The Bible states that, after the Tower of Babel fiasco, God punished the human beings by forcing them to speak different languages, so that they would not understand each other thereby giving birth to the concept of different languages.
Whatever might be the origin, today languages form the primary basis of any kind of speech and communication. Words can be easily described as the building blocks of any kind of language. The syntax and the rules by which a speech is formed in any language are known as grammar.
If we look into any language, for example, English we would be able to understand that the grammar of the language is based on elements commonly known as parts of speech.
In the English language, there are eight elementary parts of speech viz,
- Noun: This part of speech describes specific names of various kinds of objects and living beings
- Pronoun: This part of speech describes the generic names of various kinds of objects and living beings
- Verb: This part of speech describes the various actions performed by those who constitute nouns and pronouns
- Adjective: This part of speech describes the important features of the objects and beings, which make the nouns and pronouns
- Article: This part of speech helps with the articulations in a speech by indicating whether the nouns and pronouns are single, multiple, or definite
- Preposition: This part of speech is like connecting various words within a sentence by describing the position of different words concerning one another
- Adverb: This part of speech is used to modify any other verb or adjective so that the speech or sentence becomes more implicative
- Conjunction: This part of speech is like a bridge that is used to connect two different words or sentences
Needless to mention, all the definitions above constitute quite specific words which when used in any form of speech and writing wreaths magic in the form of prose and poetry that comprises literature.
Words and Games
Since their inception, words have been intriguing humankind. As and when civilizations started to form their foundations, the mystery regarding the jumbling up of words also strengthened. Jumbling up of the letters in a word is known as an anagram. Ancient Greeks loved this jumbling up of the letters in words.
This was primarily done as a fun exercise of the brain. Besides, they enhanced the mystical and hidden meaning of any kind of words as well.
While the Greeks might be the pioneers in playing up with jumbled letters in words, the Latin influence carried this practice to the modern world. Throughout the medieval ages, anagrams were the favorite of literary scholars. The modern take on anagrams can be attributed to the Victorian age when the general population took a common interest in solving up anagrams.
Today, almost all the daily newspapers have anagrams in their brain exercise sections. Besides, many computer and mobile games are also based on the concepts of anagrams. The most fun part is there are many sites available online that provide solutions to anagrams as well. For example, if you look at unscramble.org, you would be able to solve almost any kind of anagram given to you.
Why are Anagrams still popular?
If you consider that only jumbled-up letters in a word constitute a modern anagram, then you are mistaken. The current version of the anagram consists of jumbled up words and letters of a complete meaningful sentence along with words as well.
While games and puzzles constitute the primary reason for anagrams’ popularity, there are other aspects as well where anagrams prove to be quite efficient.
Some of the areas where anagrams are useful apart from puzzles & games include:
- Psychometrics: Many psychologists over the world use anagrams to analyze various kinds of implicit memories of children as well as adults.
- Priority Establishments: Eminent renaissance scientists like Galileo, Kepler, etc. used anagrams to record their findings. This was mainly done to befuddle the church and ensure their safety in some form. The famous Hooke’s law of elasticity was also published as an anagram for the first time.
- Pseudonyms: In the literary world, pseudonyms are a common occurrence. By using pseudonyms, writers hide their original identities. Anagrams are a great way of making up pseudonyms that not only hides the writers’ identity but also intrigues the readers’ interest.
- Coding important messages: Anagrams are widely used in the spy world for ciphering important messages. Despite the advancement in technology over the recent years, still, anagrams remain the favorite of the ciphers to send in encoded messages.
Anagrams have given birth to various forms of word puzzles like palindrome, isograms, pangrams, etc. They are a great way of engaging themselves when the whole world is practically stuck indoors due to the pandemic. Besides maintaining sanity in the locked-down state, they are a great way of exercising the brain without any external help.
