Editorial.

Editorial. Thirty-seven years ... hundreds of authors ... thousands ofarticles. It's been a glorious adventure, and I've enjoyedevery moment of it, but nothing lasts forever. It's time It's Time was a successful political campaign run by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) under Gough Whitlam at the 1972 election in Australia. Campaigning on the perceived need for change after 23 years of conservative (Liberal Party of Australia) government, Labor put forward a to givesomeone else a chance to experience these pleasures. Starting with theFeb 2007 issue, Jeremiah Farrell Jeremiah (Jerry) Farrell (b. 1937), is an American professor emeritus of mathematics at Butler University in Indiana. He is well-known for having designed Will Shortz's favorite puzzle, the 1996 "Election Day" crossword in the New York Times. , an emeritus e��mer��i��tus?adj.Retired but retaining an honorary title corresponding to that held immediately before retirement: a professor emeritus.n. pl. professor of mathematicsat Butler University North Western Christian University was the name when the school opened on November 1, 1855, at what is now 13th and College, with no president, 2 professors, and 20 students. In 1875, the university moved to a 25-acre campus in Irvington. and a Word Ways author since Aug 1983, will takeover the editorship with his wife Karen. I plan to continue writing WordWays articles. Word Ways was, in a real sense, founded by Martin Gardner Martin Gardner (b. October 21, 1914, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is a popular American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing magic (conjuring), pseudoscience, literature (especially Lewis Carroll), philosophy, and religion. , who in1967 suggested to Greenwood Publications that they sponsor journals onrecreational mathematics Recreational mathematics includes many mathematical games, and can be extended to cover such areas as logic and other puzzles of deductive reasoning. Even some of the most interesting problems in this field do not require a knowledge of advanced mathematics. and recreational linguistics. Greenwoodpublished Word Ways for two years, but found that they were losing moneyon it and were planning to terminate it at the time I became editor in1970. In the first issue of Word Ways in Feb 1968, Dmitri Borgmann saidthat the journal "has been created to provide a forum for allpeople interested in word puzzles and in other recreational aspects oflanguage, a meeting ground for active minds comparable to the manybooks, magazines, and columns devoted to mathematical recreations ... itis the first and only periodical periodical,a publication that is issued regularly. It is distinguished from the newspaper in format in that its pages are smaller and are usually bound, and it is published at weekly, monthly, quarterly, or other intervals, rather than daily. of its kind." When I became editor(palindromically characterized as Ross, essay assessor), I sought toexplore the limits of the new field of logology, introduced by Borgmannin his landmark book Language on Vacation just five years earlier. Ihave found it to be a surprisingly-diverse field of inquiry, with outerlimits still ill-defined, encompassing such novel concepts aseodermdromes, word worms, symmetric single-crash word groups, andself-descriptive number A self-descriptive number is an integer m that in a given base b is b-digits long in which each digit d at position n (the most significant digit being at position 0 and the least significant at position b names (using letter-scores based on scrambledalphabets). The computer has had an immense impact on Word Ways, frompreparation of camera-ready copy to logological research. Manyinvestigations that once were impossibly tedious to perform have nowbecome feasible, the most noteworthy example being the construction often-squares (although Jeff Grant has demonstrated that a great deal canstill be done by hand). Some consider this a trivialization of logology,but in reality it means that researchers can tackle wholly new problems,many of which remain to be discovered and defined. In editing Word Ways, my goal has been to let each author speak inhis own voice; I have exercised few editorial constraints, as long asthe subject bore some relevance to logology. I have encouraged a mixtureof hard-core logology (sometimes verging on mathematics) and lighter,more frivolous Of minimal importance; legally worthless.A frivolous suit is one without any legal merit. In some cases, such an action might be brought in bad faith for the purpose of harrassing the defendant. fare. In any event, I owe an immense debt to the manycontributors, and especially to Faith, who has kept the business end ofWord Ways running smoothly. Future editorial correspondence, as well as subscriptions andrenewals, should be directed to the new editor, Jeremiah Farrell, 9144Aintree Drive, Indianapolis IN 46250-4424 (e-mail wordways@butler.edu).I am confident that he will carry on the long and rich tradition of WordWays.