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  LOGOLOG
a weblog of wordplay by Eric Harshbarger

NFL

In celebration of the latest National Football Leage season starting this weekend, I thought I'd write-up a related LOGOLOG entry. "Celebration" may be a bit of an overstatement, really. While I watch NFL games on television (in fact, they're some of the very few times I actually watch television during the year), I really don't care much about any of the games, the players, or the season in general. I do like to watch good football being played, however, so I will have the TV on in the background on Sundays.

And the sport has been commented on in LOGOLOG a couple of times in the past. So, here's another entry.

Tonight, while watching the "Manning vs. Manning" match between the Colts and the Giants, I noticed that the abbreviation for the former team can be couched in a very small word: fIND. The New York Giants abbreviation was not being quite as cooperative. Could I think of a word that had the trigram "NYG" nestled in it?

"poNYGirl" was the only thing I could think might work, but given its rather adult-only nature I tried to think of another word. This quickly led, of course, to me trying to think of words for ALL of the NFL team abbreviations (as designated at the NFL website).

By this time I was paying more attention to wordplay than to the football game.

Below is the list I came up with; an asterisk denotes that I had to look up words in the dictionary... I could not think of an acceptable one lying on my sofa:

  1. sARI
  2. fATLy
  3. BALd
  4. BUFf
  5. CAR
  6. CHI
  7. aCINg
  8. CLEf
  9. peDAL
  10. DEN
  11. caDET
  12. buGBear*
  13. gHOUl
  14. fIND
  15. JACk
  16. booKCase*
  17. uMIAk
  18. MINt
  19. NEt
  20. NO
  21. nanNYGai* (some type of Australian fish)
  22. OAK
  23. PHI
  24. PIT
  25. miSDo
  26. SEA
  27. miSFit
  28. vaSTLy
  29. baTBoy
  30. TEN
  31. WAS
Generally, I was trying to get as short a word as possible. Some teams worked quite well... their abbreviations being words themselves. The fact that the NFL officially uses "JAC" for the Jacksonville Jaguars (rather than a trendier "JAX") certainly helped things out ("banJAX" being the only thing besides "aJAX" in the MW3). Still, one will note that their are only 31 items in the above list.

Yes, one (one!) team falls short in this endeavor. The New York Jets... abbreviation "NYJ". The MW3 CD-Rom returns no search results for the query: "*nyj*"... how unfortunate is that?

Does anyone have a proper name, place name, or obscure word they'd like to use to fill in this gap?

Let me know.

-- Eric

[10 September 2006]
   
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Comments about this article:
do abbr. count? if so, how about KCal? that's shorter than booKCase...

regards...

Posted by: Claude


I'm trying to stick with non-proper, single, non-hyphenated words... avoiding abbreviations. Besides, if I allowed abbreviations, then there'd be no puzzle here... since the bi- and tri-grams all came from abbreviations in the first place [grin].

Posted by: Eric


Apparently "NYJah" is a proper name, if that helps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyjah_Huston.

Posted by: Max


ruGBy is shorter than buGBear.

Posted by: Bryce Herdt


 
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