n the last issue, I introduced a game of kangaroo words. Within the letters of these marsupial words nestles (and nests!) a small word, or joey, that means the same as the fully grown word. The letters of the joey must be in proper order but not entirely adjacent. Balled up inside your stockings are your socks. Playing with kangaroo words, your mind will blossom and, hence, bloom.
Among the most satisfying of kangaroo words are those that conceal multiple joeys. Open up a container and you get a can and a tin. When you have feasted, you ate and have fed. When you deteriorate, you rot and die. Brooding inside loneliness are loss and oneness.
Within the boundaries of a municipality sit city and unity,while a community includes county and city, as well as the solids unit and unity. A chariot is both a car and a cart.
Perambulate yields ramble, within which hides amble -- almost a joey within a joey but for the solidity of amble (and you'll recall from my last column that the letters of the joey should not be entirely adjacent).
I have sighted two supreme multi-generational kangaroo words:
*expurgated, which carries the kangaroo/joey purged, which itself totes the joey pure;
![[Elsewhere in SALON: Freudian slips]](listlink.gif)
*frangible, which conceals the kangaroo/joey fragile, tucked within which is the joey frail.
I have also spotted two kangaroos that carry a joey and its antonym:
*encourage transports urge and enrage;
*the verb feast carries eat and fast.
Now we come to another rare species, in which two or more kangaroos give birth to the same joey. From both lighted and illuminated glow lit. In both observe and spectate we can see see.
Postured and positioned yield posed.
Exhilaration and exultation larger forms of elation.
Things Brobdingnagian and lumbering are big.
Joined and confederated become one.
Transgressions, perversions and misdoings are kinds of sins.
Hiding in nougat and neurotic are two different kind of nuts. We eat when we feast and breakfast. Things purged and pasteurized are pure. Unison, junction, conjunction, unification, and communication all make a union. To be stealthy, slippery and slinky is to be sly. To broadcast bombast is to boast a boast.
Lies and dead seem to me to boast the greatest number of marsupial mothers. Lies reposes in falsities, falsifies, fallacies, calumnies, hyperbolizes, plagiarizes and reclines. Dead sleeps in deceased, departed, deactivated, decayed, decapitated, disintegrated and desiccated.
Expose the miniature synonym tucked away in each of the 50 kangaroo words that are about to hop across this screen. Then hop right up to two special challenges: