A new trend in prognostication is to take the words of a Year and unravel them into an anagram. Of course the prospect of prediction has been around for quite some time going back to the days of Romulus and Remus, and even prior to that there is evidence of future predictions in the Sumerian tablets left from ancient times. This most recent trend may or may not work, but it certainly has had some strange hits in the past. Of course Anagrams have always been considered delightfully, and coincidentally spot on. For example, the writer of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s name “Douglas Adams” anagrams to “Loud Mad Sagas” which Mr. Adams clearly wrote.
In the year 2008 many used this method to find what the year two thousand eight could bring for us and some found the cryptic and mildly menacing message, ‘Statehood With a Gun.’ Could this mean a statesman would shoot several people with a gun? What it turned out to mean (if it was not merely coincidence) was more likely in regards to the 2008 Supreme Court Decision on gun control. The 2008 Supreme Court decided that citizens in Washington DC would not be denied the right to own firearms by the state government. Many, upon hearing the news of this decision turned back to the anagrams and were shocked to remember the phrase, “Statehood with a gun.”
Of course not all predictions can be considered so spot on. Two anagrams for the year 2009 revealed completely different (in fact mutually exclusive) predictions. An anagram of the phrase ‘The Year Two Thousand Nine’ reveals the phrase, “Oh, a new Tyrant to heed in US.” Of course if you simply add an ‘and’ to the same phrase and make it “The Year two-thousand and nine” you get a completely different revelation, “No new hot-headed tyrant in USA.” It seems these anagrams can be at times ambiguous to say the least depending on syntax.
But then there are the absolutely incredible anagrams that have been discovered over the years. Anagram for the word “Astronomers” has turned out to be “Moon Starers,” while the alternate is “No more stars.” Late Night Talk Show Host David Letterman’s name is anagrammed into “Nerd Amid Late TV.” A debit card can be reread as “Bad Credit.” The moon’s famous phrase spoken by Neil Armstrong ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’ can become “A thin man ran, makes a large stride, left planet, pins flag on Moon! On to Mars!” We see that entire phrases become quite apt adaptations or descriptions of those saying them at times. “To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” incredibly becomes the quite apt phrase, “In one of the Bard’s best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.”
While these last two are certainly entertaining, are they predictive of the future? There are a few anagram generators on the internet, and putting in the year ‘Two Thousand Ten’ returns several thousand uninteresting results and a few that seem to be possibly predictive. “To Haunted Towns,” could suggest either the housing market’s continue to decline and eventually turn entire communities into ghost towns. Alternately, it could suggest the public’s increased interest in the paranormal, suggesting eventually ghost towns will be invaded by scores of interested investigators. “Deaths Unto Town” could suggest a massive (yet vague) catastrophe that could result in a great number of deaths in a town, or the death of the town itself. “Sun Watt Hoot End” could suggest the death of aspiring solar energy enterprises by some other force, or perhaps even the discovery of an alternate form of green energy that renders photovoltaic power to be unnecessary. Of course there are several more predictions to be made before January first.