Want to put your last name or your street number on your mailbox? The Big Box has got you covered. Here’s just one set of the many options on display across from our wide variety of shiny new mailboxes:
You’ll probably have noticed that a few of those letters are out of place. There’s an S in the spot for the letter B, and one of the U’s has drifted over in the spot for V. That happens in retail. Customers pick things up and then put them back down — usually not in the same place.
The other thing that happens with this display, of course, is that customers rearrange the letters here to spell out words. Usually dirty words. It’s something you learn to keep an eye out for when you work there. It is, after all, supposed to be a family friendly store, so it’s best not to have R-rated language prominently displayed on this pegboard in aisle 13.
So this is a thing we do when we’re passing through that aisle. We glance at the letter boards and make sure that some joker has not, yet again, rearranged the letters to spell out F-U-…
Happily, though, the F-bomb is only the second-most popular word that customers like to post on this sign. The most common word we find there, actually, is “POOP.”
That’s sort of charming — perhaps the most innocent dirty word there is. It’s scatological, so it sort of counts as a vaguely transgressive dirty word. But the FCC isn’t going to fine anyone for saying it on the air, and no kid has ever gotten their mouth washed out with soap for saying “poop.”
I think the main reason that customers keep POOP-ing this display, though, is the ease and speed of it. It’s almost elegant how little effort it takes to rearrange the alphabet to produce “POOP.” Half of the word is already there. All one needs to do to create this new four-letter word is move two letters, shifting them only a total of four spaces over, and the giggle-inducing deed is done.
“POOP” is thus one of the most efficient new words that one can create by rearranging the letters on this board. “STOP” would be, I think,  the most efficient word — a new four-letter word requiring only two letters to be shifted only a total of two spaces. I think there’s only one other four-letter word that can be created with so few steps, but maybe I’m missing something.
(That may also be what you’re thinking right now: “Maybe I’m missing something.” But no, you’re not. This post has no larger point that to present this Big Box display as a kind of Will Shortz puzzle for our amusement.)
So, then, what other efficiently created words can we arrange with a display like this? I mean, we have the whole alphabet to work with here, so it’s possible to spell out any word of six letters or less. But where’s the fun in that? To make this a good puzzle, we’ll need some constraints:
• Words must be at least four letters.
• Two letters have to be left in their original location.
• The total number of steps — the number of spaces shifted up or over to put the new letters in place — must be less than 10. (“STORY,” for example, would qualify, requiring a shift of 1 space for the O, 3 spaces for the R, and 5 spaces for the Y.) Bonus style points for creating a word using less than 8 steps.
 Have at it.
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