A woman shoots her husband, then holds him under water for five minutes. Finally, she hangs him. Five minutes later they enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?
A word with horizontal symmetry is one whose letters are a mirror image of themselves. If you drew a horizontal line across the word and folded it over, it would overlap on itself. For example, EXCEEDED and ICEBOX have horizontal symmetry, but VERTICAL and SIMPLE do not.
What is the longest word with horizontal symmetry?
A key. It has a jagged cut in order to fit the lock. A locked door keeps people out and the keyhole is dark. Key rings are a common way to hold a set of keys, and when you’re using a key that one is quiet, but the rest jingle and jangle.
As a result of temporary magical powers, you have made it to the Wimbledon finals and are playing Roger Federer for all the marbles. However, your powers cannot last the whole match. What score do you want it to be when they disappear, to maximize your chances of hanging on for a win?
It sounds obvious that you should ask to be ahead two sets to love (it takes 3 out of 5 sets to win the men’s), and in the third set, ahead 5-0 in games and 40-love in the sixth game. (Probably you want to be serving, but if your serve is like mine, you might prefer Roger to be serving the sixth game down 0-40 so that you can pray for a double fault.)
Not so fast! These solutions give you essentially 3 chances to get lucky and win, but you can get six chances—with three services by you and three by Roger. You still want to be up two sets to none, but let the game score be 6-6 in the third set and 6-0—in your favor, of course—in the tiebreaker.
Fish. The gh is pronounced as in tough, the o as in women and the ti as in nation. Ghoti is a constructed word to illustrate irregularities in English spelling.