The Anagrammies are the official monthly awards of the Usenet newsgroup alt.anagrams. Throughout the month original anagrams posted to the group are nominated for several categories:
- General Category - a sort of catch-all
- Entertainment - anagrams from the world of entertainment (Hollywood, sports, etc.)
- Topical - anagrams pertaining to current events
- Rude - anagrams with adult language or situations
- Spam - for spamagrams, i.e., anagrams made from spam postings to the newsgroup.
- Long Spam - spamagrams more than 100 letters long
- Long - anagrams more than 40 letters long
- People's Names - anagrams from people's names, whether it be a spammer, a regular, a newbie, or just anyone requested...
- Other Names - anagrams of places, companies, products, etc.
- Anagram Set - several anagrams of a phrase, usually on a common theme
- Special - creatively engineered anagrams
Voting on nominated anagrams happens around the first week of the month.
Some of the stuff people come up with is just amazing. I'll just quote one here and hope they don't kill me: this is the winner of the "Long" category in August 2000, an anagrammed commentary on a Shakespeare sonnet, by Richard Grantham.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Obviously old Will never got any farther south than Croydon, or else his real esteem of summer might have been rather less immoderate. Here in Australia, for instance, summer lasts for approximately eight and a half months and is bloody hot. It's often bad enough to melt corrugated iron, old shoes and sometimes shoelaces. And the threat of *eternal* summer down here is enough to make you move to the Scottish Highlands... well, almost. Nothing's this strong.
So I feel his summer reference is a bit odd, unless of course his dedicatee was a heated raving nymphomaniac on ten men a day. And let's hope he wasn't.
The web site for the Anagrammies is at www.anagrammy.com and the relevant newsgroup is alt.anagrams.
No, I'm not up for nomination or anything like that. My motives are pure.
Er, I amend that. It looks like I was nominated, way back in 1998 when I still read that group...