Does This Work?

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The Word Machine | Gulliver's Secret | Cranking the Word Machine | Does This Work?

To sceptics who see nothing more than wish-fulfillment in the anagrammatic method, Henrion says:

The first reaction of the elementary mind is that any word may be deduced from any word with such a silly system, quite worthy of the Lagado cranks. But it is not so. Take two words of the same length from a dictionary, and try whether you can deduce one from the other, taking good care that the shifting groups are equal (remember that one only can be one either longer or shorter than the others). You will easily constitute a first shifting group, sometimes you will manage a second, but you will very rarely indeed arrange the last. The percentage of failures will astonish you.^[1]

I can verify this, having tried up to twenty possibilities before hitting on the solution. The problem with the academic respectability of the anagrammatic method is that there is the odd duplication of answer, but only in 5-letter words with a 3-2 grouping (a 2 group is mathematically easier to duplicate) or in the odd 7-letter group with a 3-2-2 grouping, or 8-letter group with a 3-3-2 grouping.

One mistake that I believe Henrion made was his quite arbitrary idea of allowing for the odd extra "E" in his translations. For instance, he translates HURGO as LORD(E), when it can be BARON (in this case, referring to Bolingbroke's peerage). In another case, he translates, SKYRESH BOLGOLAM as R0BERT(E) WALPOLE, whereas, if he had looked in the Second Edition of the Travels, he would have found SKYRESH spelled SKYRIS, a proper anagram of ROBERT.

In another case, he translates GLUMGLUM as DUCHESS(E), when it can be translated as VISCOUNT, again referring to Bolingbroke. Cases like this can detract from the credibility of his thesis, but I have no doubt he was on the right track: the evidence in the Travels, and in the practise of anagram cracking, is overwhelming.

Notes