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Ovine Metathesis
I play in a Salvation Army band, and I have on and off for sixty years. At band rehearsal this week we warmed up with Lois Bourgeois’s 16th century hymn tune known as “Old Hundredth”. Nowadays churchgoers sing the doxology “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” to Old Hundredth but mostly associate it with William Kethe’s paraphrase of Psalm 100, “All people that on earth do dwell”. Hence its name. In his devotional thoughts just before we started playing, my friend Gord mentioned the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational, which asked readers to take a well known word and alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply…