From: utzoo!decvax!microsof!fluke!vax1:toma Newsgroups: net.jokes Title: Rotatable Words Article-I.D.: vax1.275 Posted: Thu Jan 20 18:50:31 1983 Received: Fri Jan 21 06:44:12 1983 Impressed by the incredibly meaningless hieroglyphics that un-decrypted jokes contain, I wondered if there exist words that, once rotated, are still words. So, to satisfy my curiousity, I rotated the entire file /usr/dict/words, then ran fgrep (for about four hours) to find any common words. Here is the list of rotatable words (for a rotation of 13): nu nag onyx one or ova pent rail ret she trag try tang Terre vex vi ant ah bar balk be bin crag envy erg fur gnat Greer gent gel irk iv Half of the list is merely the other half rotated. I challenge anyone out there to create a joke, using only the above words, that is still a joke after it is rotated. The prize goes to the one that is actually funny, as well. My favorite word of the entire list is gnat (or alternatively, tang). "gnat" has the tremendously improbable property that after it is rotated, it becomes "tang", which is "gnat" spelled backwards!! Put that in your column, Hofstadter. Tom Anderson John Fluke Mfg. Everett, Wa.