The list

...of words made from the letters in the phrase MERRY CHRISTMAS has continued to grow. When I mentioned the list to you a few days ago I had found 574 words but as of this morning the total has grown to -- who woulda thunk? -- a whopping 626 words. There may be even a few more but the time has come to bring it to a conclusion and move on to other things. I haven't bothered to put the words n alphabetic order, but you may do it if you want to take the time. Here is my list in the order the words occurred to me:

merry Christ I me my a am as at arm arms army armies may aa mace maces race races racer racers sit sits sat sate sates same tame tames tamer tamers tam tams ram rams cam cams came chime chimes stem stems it its mat mats mast masts cast casts (50) cat cats mite mites smite smites aster asters master masters mist mists mister misters term terms stay stays cherry trey treys tic tics site sites cite cites citer citers team teams ream reams seam seams steam steams steamy stream streams the them they their theism therm therms mystic mystics trim (100) trims cyst cysts misty chat chats hat hats hit hits ham hams sham shams shame shames shamer shamers stammer stammers match matches chimera chimeras mire mires miry ire tire tires sir sirs stir stirs sire sires shirt shirts cash cashes rise rises rim rims rime rimes chaste haste hastes ash (150) ashes stash mash mashes marsh marshes mar mars rash rashes mesh time times timer timers rite rites satire satires stir stirs stirrer stirrers ret rets rest rests try tries sty sties star stars stare stares starer starers tar tars tare tares tear tears rate rates irate imam imams messy mercy (200) march marches marcher marchers starch starchers char chars chart charts arrest arrests heart hearts hearty hear hears shear shears share shares hare hares hair hairs chair chairs reach teach chase chases chaser chasers ate eat eats seat seats sear sears stair stairs rat rats tea teas harm harms (250) harmer harmers charm charms charmer charmers err errs terry tarry tarries hasty stray strays tray trays yea yeas yeas yeasts year years yes say says yet art arts mart marts smarts scam scams scammer scammers camera cameras cay cays scare scares car cars scar scars scary care cares yam yams (300) ray rays raise raises arc arcs crash crashes crasher crashers rhea rheas mare mares scram scrams tam tams ear ears erst mar mars air airs cram craams scream screams cream creams creamy scat scats heist heists cheat cheats east easy chit chits sear sears hart harts harem harems harry harries (350) drare rarer charter charters crass crash crashes crasher crashers share shares sharer sharers char chars chasm chasms hem hems hemmer hemmers trimmer trimmers mr mars tie ties tier tiers rite rites rim rims scrim scrims retch shire shires tram trams mart marts schism mica mice rice he him his her (400) hers shimmer shimmers shimmery smarmy smarmier smarmiest set sets aim aims ace aces meat meats mate mates ahem atheism remit remits remiss resist search chest chests reach charism thrice amity marry marries hysteria hysteric hysterics heir heirs arch arches sherry shir shirs shim shims hermit hermits hamster hamsters thyme raise (450) raises chaise chaises shimmy shimmies carry carries rich richer richest riches sachet sachets shay shays shimmery mayhem smirch smirches charity simmer simmers emir emirs emit emits hire hires hirer hirers crime crimes miter miters martyr cartyrs satry satrys yacht yachts strayer strayers stayer stayers math myth myths mythic schema schemas (500) shirt shirts cart carts trace traces tracer tracers aye ayes essay scythe scythes thesis asset rhyme rhymes rhymer rhymers smith smiths smithy this hate hates hater haters as ha aha hi ahi cashier cashiers racy caste castes hay hey meta carry carries carrier carriers ma mercy mercies emissary amiss miss (550) city hammer hammers trash trashy ashy starry hairy miss mass casher chashers riser risers myrrh misery sitar sitars merit merits itch itches itchy arise arises masher mashers item items crime crimes Amish acre acres shema metric metrics simmer simmers sari saris stymie stymies em ems mesa mesas smash smasher stash (600) sstasher cry cries mastic symmetric ache aches eth eths cater caters Artemis era eras ethic ethics scathe scathes sash miser misers smear smears smeary mime mimes (626)

That's all, folks. Well, probably not. There are undoubtedly some I missed.

You are welcome to point them out to me in the comments.

Making a list and checking it twice

A couple of posts back I had some fun tinkering with prefixes and, let's face it, pseudo-prefixes that weren't legitimate prefixes at all. For example, to the supposed base word 'bra' I made the prefixes alge-, penum-, um-, verte-, and ze-. Reader Emma Springfield, who lives so far northwest in Iowa that she can see South Dakota, said her favorite game is to take a word or phrase and see how many words she could come up with. I know I ended that sentence with two prepositions but I'm allowed since I used the Oxford comma earlier in the paragraph.

I decided to try Emma's game for myself and used MERRY CHRISTMAS as the phrase. I think I hit the proverbial jackpot because so far, from two M's, one E, three R's, one Y, one C, one H, one I, two S's, one T, and one A your intrepid correspondent has come up with -- wait for it -- 574 words! I made the hard decision to exclude a few naughty/crude/Anglo-Saxon words from the list, which would have 578 words in all with them included.

I promise to publish my list in the next post. First, however, please try your hand at your own MERRY CHRISTMAS list in the comments section. You may be surprised how fast it grows because plurals do count.

And thinking of Christmas actually made me feel cooler in the 90°F (32°C) weather we've had in Georgia this week.

Seven days make one weak

...especially when one thinks of how many different ways humans have devised to identify the days of the week. According to Ethnologue, there are nearly 7,000 languages in our world. Papua New Guinea alone is home to over 500 of them. Don't worry. I'm not going to go down 7,000 rabbit trails or we would be here all day, all night (Mary Ann), all week, all month, all year. Perish the thought. But I do want to show you what various people call the days of the week.

About half of the people in the world start their week with Sunday, and about half the people in the world (not the same half) start their week with Monday. A few people -- millions, actually, but I'm speaking relatively -- start their week with Friday or Saturday. In many languages the days are named after objects in the heavens (sun, moon), Norse deities (Tye, Odin, Thor, Frigg), or Roman deities (Mars, Mercury, Jove, Venus, Saturn) that also became the names of objects in the heavens. For example, Thursday is named after Thor, the Norse god of lightning, thunder, and storms. It becomes Donnerstag (Donner's day) in German for Donner, god of thunder. A rabbit trail here, the names of two of Santa Claus's reindeer, Donner and Blitzen, are the German words for thunder and lightning. Also, the Germans chose not to honor the Norse god Odin but to call that particular day Mittwoch (midweek) instead.

In the table below, I have begun with the commom abbreviated forms of the days of the week in English.

<----------------Days Of The Week----------------->

English:	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Swedish:	måndag	tiesdag	onsdag	torsdag	fredag	lördag	söndag
French:	lundi	mardi	mercredi	jeudi	vendredi	samedi	dimanche
Spanish:	Lunes	Martes	Mièrcoles	Jueves	Viernes	Sàbado	Domingo
German:	Montag	Dienstag	Mittwoch	Donnerstag	Freitag	Samstag	Sonntag
Italian:	lunedi	martedi	mercoledi	giovedi	venerdi	sabato	domenica

In Albanian, the days of the week are E hënë, E martë, E mërkurë, E enjte, E premte, E shtunë, and E diel. Mars and Mercury are discernible, but something else has happened as well.

In Polish, the days of the week are poniedziałek, wtorek, środa, czwąrtek, piatek, sobota, and niedziela.

In Hawaiian, the days of the week are Po'akahi, Po'alua, Po'akolu, Po'aha, Po'alima, Po'aono, and Lapule.

In Swahili, the days of the week are Jumamosi, Jumapili, Jumatatu, Jumanne, Jumatano, Alhamisi, and Ijumaa.

Did you know there are three systems, all acceptable, for saying "Monday" in Mandarin Chinese? Well, there are. Using Pinyin (romanization of the Mandarin ideographs), they are xīngqī yī, zhōu yī, and libài yī. If in those three phrases you were to replace yī with èr, sān, sì, wù, and liù you would have just indicated three ways to say Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, respectively, in Mandarin Chinese. It is interesting to note that Mandarin does not honor any deity at all; what one actually says is "Day 1" through "Day 6".

In each of the three acceptable ways of indicating days of the week in Mandarin (xīngqī, zhōu, libài) there are two words, neither of which means 7, that one can use to indicate Sunday: rì and tiān. It is therefore entirely accurate and within reason, when you consider that 3 × 2 = 6, to conclude that trying to learn Mandarin Chinese will knock you six ways from Sunday.

The language goes round and round

...and it comes out here at rhymeswithplague blog, where today we take a look at the wonderful world of prefixes and the many possible expansions thereto, depending on what you are prefixing:

• form -- con-, de-, in-, per-, re-, trans, uni-.
• firm -- af-, con-, in-.
• ply -- ap-, com-, im-, multi-, re-, sup-.
• found -- con-, pro-.
• fuse -- con-, de-, ef-, in-, pro-, re-, suf-, trans-.
• phony -- caco-, sym-, tele-, anti-, poly-.
• tate -- agi-, anno-, dic-, es-, hesi-, intes-, lac-, mu-, poten-, resusci-, ro-.
• nate -- abomi-, bicarbo-, carbo-, concate-, desig-, deto-, domi-, elimi-, fortu-, germi-, halluci-, illumi-, impreg-, into-, nomi-, predomi-, reso-, termi-, unfortu-, uri-, vacci-.
• late -- accumu-, ambu-, assimi-, choco-, discombobu-, emu-, extrapo-, formu-, gesticu-, immo-, invio-, muti-, ob-, oscil-, perambu-, perco-, popu-, regu-, simu-, titil-, vio-.
• gate -- fumi-, insti-, investi-, miti-, navi-, obli-, propa-, surro-.
• cate -- abdi-, adjudi-, bifur-, defe-, desic-, forni-, indi-, lubri-, medi-, predi-, repli-, suppli-, va-.
• motion -- com-, de-, e-, loco-, pro-.
• position -- ap-, com-, de-, decom-, im-, op-, pro-, re-, sup-, trans-.
• astic -- bomb-, chili-, dr-, el-, fant-, mon-, orgi-, pl-, schol-.
• gestion -- con-, decon-, di-, indi-, sug-.
• bra -- alge-, penum-, um-, verte-, ze-.

Well, that's enough for now. Your head will stop swimming eventually. You may even want to try playing this game yourself.

This post has been done in a spirit of fun, rather tongue-in-cheek, but my old English teacher, Mr. D.P. Morris, is probably spinning in his grave at my audacity.

My favorite photo of 2023

The photo below was snapped in March of this year at the wedding of one of our grandsons. Mrs. RWP (the fair Ellie) and I won the competition at the reception as the couple who had been married the longest. FYI, two months later (that would be, um, in May) we celebrated 60 years of marriage.

This may also be my all-time favorite post in nearly 16 years of blogging here at rhymeswithplague, in spite of the fact that we have no idea who the wedding guests in the background are. And for those who have been clamoring (clamoring, I tell you) for a recent photo, this is it!

All cities are not created equal

...but some are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and among these are Life, Liberty, and the ability to attract the Wealthy. My apologies to Thomas Jefferson.

At the end of the preceding post, I included the factoid that New York City has more millionaires than any other place on earth. According to the site where I found that bit of information, the top 20 places of concentrated wealth on our planet are:

Rank	City	Millionaires	Billionaires
#1	New York City, USA	345,600	59
#2	Tokyo, Japan	304,900	12
#3	San Francisco, USA	276,400	62
#4	London, England	272,400	38
#5	Singapore	249,800	26
#6	Los Angeles, USA	192,400	34
#7	Chicago, USA	160,100	28
#8	Houston, USA	132,600	25
#9	Beijing, China	131,500	44
#10	Shanghai, China	130,100	42
#11	Sydney, Australia	129,500	16
#12	Hong Kong, China	125,100	28
#13	Frankfurt, Germany	117,400	14
#14	Toronto, Canada	116,100	17
#15	Zurich, Switzerland	105,100	12
#16	Seoul, South Korea	102,100	25
#17	Melbourne, Australia	97,300	12
#18	Dallas, USA	92,300	18
#19	Geneva, Switzerland	90,300	16
#20	Paris, France	88,600	15

In summary, the 20 cities above are home to 3,259,600 millionaires and 543 billionaires. Any way you slice it, the group represents a lot of moolah.

Other websites have put together other lists that mention other cities, so I suppose the jury is still out. In New York City's case, 345,600 millionaires is a formidable number but it is actually only four per cent (4%) of the city's 8,500,000 inhabitants. Still, if that same percentage of millionaires to population had existed in the little Texas town of 1,000 where I grew up, there would have been 40 millionaires among my neighbors.

I have one thing to say about that.

No way, José.

Speaking of millionaires, today's closing factoid is that former Atlanta Braves baseball player Chipper Jones has downsized. Earlier this month he sold his 23,000 sq.ft. house on 38 acres for $11,750,000 and later the same day paid $5,700,000 for a 9,100 sq.ft. house on 10 acres. Even the ultra-wealthy need to tighten their belts occasionally. And since both properties are right here in Cherokee County he is tecnically a neighbor of mine.

Pretty soon we’re talking real money

Some numbers are so large that it is difficult to get one's head around them. For example, the national debt of the United States at present is nearly THIRTY-TWO TRILLION DOLLARS. That's 32 × 10¹², 32 with 12 zeroes after it.

There was a time not too long ago when countries didn't agree on what the words billion, trillion, and quadrillion actually meant. In some countries 10⁹ was called a billion but in other countries it was called a thousand million or a milliard. In some countries 10¹² was called a trillion but in other countries it was called a billion or a million million; in the latter countries 10¹⁸ was called a trillion. This state of affairs could (and often did) lead to misunderstanding in financial matters and topics like national debts.

Are you confused? Eventually agreement was reached on terminology. I remind you of what Republican U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois once said, "A few billion here, a few billion there, pretty soon we're talkng real money."

Just how big is 32 trillion? Instead of money, let's consider time. We all know that there are 60 seconds in a minute. Since there are 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day, each day is made up of 14,400 seconds. A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is about 31.5 years. A trillion seconds is about 31,710 years. Change seconds to dollars, then multiply that last number by 32 and you will begin to understand the enormity of the U.S. national debt.

Here is a mind-boggling equation:

32 × 31,710 = 1,014,720

That's the number of years it would take to eradicate the current U.S. national debt paying it at the rate of one dollar per second. Even at a rate of $1,000 per second, it would still take 1,014.72 years to do it.

Factoid of the day: Henley Global Citizens Report has found that New York City is the wealthiest city in the world in terms of number of millionaires and billionaires. Among its approximately 8,500,000 inhabitants there are 345,600 millionaires and 59 billionaires.