Ruin a book with one letter. First try, Naked Bunch.
Some of the other answers were Night Club, Moby Duck and Sale of Two Cities. I wondered if I could use Uncle Tom's Cabin somehow, but then it occurred to me that it would be fun to have a program that would give all words within n letter distance from some arbitrary word. So, I could enter Cabin and see if there were words within 1 letter distance. I looked online for about 30 seconds, and didn't find it, so that means that no one has ever thought of that, ever.
So, that's my idea. Code a function where ('tale', 1) returns ['sale', 'male', 'pale', 'talk', 'tall', 'tile', ...etc].
It could be a component of a longer program that calculates answers to those problems like 'Turn pain into rail in the shortest number of steps possible, wherein each step you can change one letter in the word. e.g. pain => rain => rail'
Edit (really, 2 minutes later). I was looking for the Levenshtein Distance. I knew that!
Edit. Well, would you look at that: Levenshtein-Automata
Edit. And that. Levenshtein-Puzzle
Edit. Approach would be to find the n=1 distance by inputting the word, say word, and search a dictionary for .ord then w.rd then wo.d then wor. and concatenate the results. Simple. To find n=2 distance, input each of those words into the same function, but being careful to filter out searches that would search the same space. And so on. [Edit. No, that's dumb. To find n=2, just search a dictionary for ..rd then .o.d then .or. then w..d and so on.]
Edit. Okay, done. Also on Github.
I have used it to find these gems:
Edit (really, 2 minutes later). I was looking for the Levenshtein Distance. I knew that!
Edit. Well, would you look at that: Levenshtein-Automata
Edit. And that. Levenshtein-Puzzle
Edit. Approach would be to find the n=1 distance by inputting the word, say word, and search a dictionary for .ord then w.rd then wo.d then wor. and concatenate the results. Simple. To find n=2 distance, input each of those words into the same function, but being careful to filter out searches that would search the same space. And so on. [Edit. No, that's dumb. To find n=2, just search a dictionary for ..rd then .o.d then .or. then w..d and so on.]
Edit. Okay, done. Also on Github.
I have used it to find these gems:
- War and Pence
- A Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man
- Brave Neg World
- The Gripes of Wrath
- The Pun Also Rises
- The Sub Also Rises
- Tropic of Canker
- The Maltose Falcon
- The Catcher in the Eye
- Something Wacked This Way Comes
- Men and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- The Call of the Mild
- Nuked Lunch
- Bridesdead Revisited
- Sometimes a Great Lotion
- American Goys
A fun little project.