A friend of mine posted a meme on FaceBook yesterday:
A couple of days ago, when my math teacher asked "Any questions?"
I asked "What's the meaning of life?" She simply replied "The meaning of life is math."
Today, we realized that, in the alphabet, M is the 13th letter, A is the 1st letter, T is the 20th letter, and H is th 8th letter.
13 + 1 + 20 + 8 = 42
This is, of course, a fun little nod to the late Douglas Adams' masterwork of comedic science fiction, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where the answer, the ultimate answer, of life, the uniferse, and everything turns out to be 42. The problem is that nobody knows what the question actually is.
After I chuckled at the joke, I wondered what other words might equal 42 in the same manner that "math" does. This is a reasonably simple task for a programmer to tackle. 20 minutes later, I knew the answers. Today, in a grand gesture of magnanimity, I'm sharing the answers with you, dear reader.
life_words.txt has the end result of the program. And it didn't even take seven and a half million years to run, nor was my computer destroyed to make way for a bypass. Though, you must agree, bypasses have got to be built!
My personal favorites from the list:
- bitch
- borg
- deadbeat
- gnat
- rebel
- five (five == 42, this will be delightfully obtuse to explain to people)
Many thanks to @dwyl for the plain-text dictionary. You can grab your copy at https://github.com/dwyl/english-words
This code is hereby donated to the public domain. Magnanimity runs rampant today!