Hooting Yard reader Richard Carter has a letter published in the latest edition of the London Review Of Books. I take the liberty of reproducing it here for your edification and instruction. Our resident anagrammatist R. (who is not Richard, by the way) should find it of particular interest:
Steven Shapin writes that Darwin’s uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life (LRB, 30 June). Some years ago, to my delight, I worked out that the great man’s full name, Charles Robert Darwin, is an anagram of ‘rectal winds abhorrer’. Unfortunately for my anagram, the meanings of words, like species, can evolve. On the rare occasions that Darwin mentioned his problems to friends, he always used the word ‘flatulence’. Nowadays, we think of flatulence as being synonymous with farting, but in Darwin’s day it meant (as it technically still does) an accumulation of gases in the alimentary canal. While I’m sure that Darwin must have vented his excess gas one way or the other, there’s no reason to believe that his farts were uncontrollable.
Heaven’s pints
pave thinness
Shaven instep
invents shape
Spinet’s haven
seventh Spain
Charles Darwin
Narwhals cried
Calendars whir
Cardinal Shrew
Handrail screw
Harridan’s clew
Radials wrench
Canals whirred
Rancid whalers
Inward larches
Scrawlier hand
Danish crawler
Handier scrawl
Hardliners caw
Rewinds a larch
Hews Carnal Rid
Radar lech wins
Shrewd cranial
(etc)
…Certain of the above phrases seem awfully Hooting Yardesque. I wonder if I have unwittingly discovered the secret to Mr Key’s literary technique. Are all of his unlikely tales based somehow on anagrams?
Mr Carter : You might be on to something…
I went to school with a girl called Heather Freeman, and was delighted to discover one day that her name was an anagram of ‘Fear her methane’.
Father her enema!