![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuAt last night's meeting to discuss Phase II of our synagogue's renovation, the rabbi was discussing with admiration the bet medrash (study hall) of a synagogue in the next town over from Newton:
"The Young Israel of FIRST has a beautiful SECOND bet medrash."
Let me unpack that title for you non-NPL-types out there.
This is a "flat," a puzzle in which you have two words or phrases, which are represented in the text by placeholder words such as FIRST and SECOND, and whose actual lengths and punctuation are given by the numbers at the end of the title -- in this case, FIRST has 9 letters and is a capitalized word; SECOND is a hyphenated word with four letters before the hyphen and five after. This pair of words/phrases is called the "base" of the flat.
• A "changeover" is a flat where you can turn the FIRST into the SECOND by taking one letter out of the FIRST and inserting a different letter into the remaining string to get the SECOND. (For example, "brain" could become "bring" by changing over the "a" to the "g".)
• A "second-to-last changeover" specifies that it's the second letter of FIRST that gets removed, and that the changed letter becomes the last letter of SECOND. (So our "brain" to "bring" would be a third-to-last changeover.)
• This one is "freewheeling" because the 4-5 hyphenated word is not itself in the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, but its component pieces are.
• And it's "found" because I didn't make up the base out of my own mind, instead I "found" it by noticing it in something someone else said.
That sounds a lot more complicated than it is. The nice thing about tagging is that once you get used to it, it packs a lot of information into very little space.
"The Young Israel of FIRST has a beautiful SECOND bet medrash."
Let me unpack that title for you non-NPL-types out there.
This is a "flat," a puzzle in which you have two words or phrases, which are represented in the text by placeholder words such as FIRST and SECOND, and whose actual lengths and punctuation are given by the numbers at the end of the title -- in this case, FIRST has 9 letters and is a capitalized word; SECOND is a hyphenated word with four letters before the hyphen and five after. This pair of words/phrases is called the "base" of the flat.
• A "changeover" is a flat where you can turn the FIRST into the SECOND by taking one letter out of the FIRST and inserting a different letter into the remaining string to get the SECOND. (For example, "brain" could become "bring" by changing over the "a" to the "g".)
• A "second-to-last changeover" specifies that it's the second letter of FIRST that gets removed, and that the changed letter becomes the last letter of SECOND. (So our "brain" to "bring" would be a third-to-last changeover.)
• This one is "freewheeling" because the 4-5 hyphenated word is not itself in the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, but its component pieces are.
• And it's "found" because I didn't make up the base out of my own mind, instead I "found" it by noticing it in something someone else said.
That sounds a lot more complicated than it is. The nice thing about tagging is that once you get used to it, it packs a lot of information into very little space.