Annagrammar

This is something I wrote with my friend Allan Philips from Middle School. He goes to Stanford:


Dear Mr. Reilly,

We appreciated and enjoyed your submissions to our upcoming volume, “Anagram, Anagram!” Some of your entries may well be used. However, we rejected the following for reasons I trust you will agree upon.


A man, a plan, a canal, Panama -> A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.
(Though this is technically an anagram, it is more impressive when presented as a palindrome.)

Principals Emeritus -> Pale Princes Merit Us
(Makes assumptions about audience; could be included with minor revision.)

Jibbety jabbety rat-a-tat-tat -> Ribbety tabbety jat-a-tat-tat
(Scat is cheating. You are abusing anagrammar.)

Rock the Casbah -> Cash the Baroque
(I agree with you, it should work but it does not. I must deny your request for poetic license. Ours is a written medium; phonetic anagrams will not do.)

Closet but no cigar -> Cigar Butts Console
(Here you compromise a popular cliché and still arrive at a banal recombination. Desperation has begun to seep into your work.)

Pol Pot is an evil man -> Pol Pot is a vile mann.
(Does not even warrant comment.)

Yggdrasil, Thy Rhythmic Myrrh! -> ??????????????
(You've got balls, Reilly, I'll give you that. Still, execution is key, and your pandering to my Nordic heritage seems almost sycophantic. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.)

William Makepeace Thackeray -> Carapace Althea Meek Kim Wily
(This came towards the end of your submission, amid myriad similar entries. I hesitate to level what is the greatest insult in our field, but I believe you resorted to an anagram generator)


Sincerely,


Niklas Forslund

P.S. Your proposed nom de plume, “Anne A. Graham,” is trite. We know you can do better.