Thursday, May 29, 2008

GHOSTS APPEAR AND FADE AWAY: Nothing, I'll bet, is as haunting as the feeling that you overthought a word that you could have spelled. In Round 2, it was turning "onomasticon" into the prettier but less correct "aunimosticaun." In Round 3, it was the ornamental "i" that turned "quaquaversal" into "quaiquaversal." Here in Round 4, the siren call of the medical words, with their irresistable Italianate hard "ch"-es, beckoned Keertan Kini overboard by twisting "Deuterocanonical" ("of books and passages of the Christian Bible not extant in Hebrew") into "Deuterochinonical" (presumably, "of an organism in the cytoplasm of cells in which the second statement of Mosaic law is encoded").

It gets ugly at the end, 6 out of the last 10 falling to the likes of "polytrichous" ("like monotrichous, except more"), "anticyclolysis" ("the process of removing unibrow"), and "cordonnet" ("a military trdummpet"). Yet there is Matthew Koh, still the last man standing, still staring you down, the cold-blooded assassin.

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