trusatile
adj. that may be pushed; worked or driven by pushing
“His Mother-in-Law”
He stood on his head by the wild seashore,
And danced on his hands a jig;
In all his emotions, as never before,
A wildly hilarious grig.
And why? In that ship just crossing the bay
His mother-in-law had sailed
For a tropical country far away,
Where tigers and fever prevailed.
Oh, now he might hope for a peaceful life
And even be happy yet,
Though owning no end of neuralgic wife,
And up to his collar in debt.
He had borne the old lady through thick and thin,
And she lectured him out of breath;
And now as he looked at the ship she was in
He howled for her violent death.
He watched as the good ship cut the sea,
And bumpishly up-and-downed,
And thought if already she qualmish might be,
He’d consider his happiness crowned.
He watched till beneath the horizon’s edge
The ship was passing from view;
And he sprang to the top of a rocky ledge
And pranced like a kangaroo.
He watched till the vessel became a speck
That was lost in the wandering sea;
And then, at the risk of breaking his neck,
Turned somersaults home to tea.
Noted
Went yesterday to Cambridge and spent most of the day at Mount Auburn; got my luncheon at Fresh Pond, and went back again to the woods. After much wandering and seeing many things, four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.
— Emerson, Journals, April 11, 1834
Close Enough
In 1977 Jay Ames found he could approximate nursery rhymes using the names in the Toronto telephone directory:
Barr Barre Black Shipp
Haff Yew Anney Wool
Yetts Herr, Yetts Herr
Three Baggs Voll
Wan Farr Durr Master
Won Forder Dame
An Wun Varder Littleboys
Watt Lief Sinne Allain.
In 1963 the TV show I’ve Got A Secret searched the phone books of New York City to find residents whose names, in order, approximated the lyrics to “In the Good Old Summertime”:
Midy’s Theorem
The decimal expansion of 1/7 is
0.142857142857 …
Interestingly, if you split the repeating decimal period in half and add the two complements, you get a string of 9s:
142 + 857 = 999
It turns out this is true for every fraction with a prime denominator and a repeating decimal period of even length:
1/11 = 0.090909 …
0 + 9 = 9
1/13 = 076923 …
076 + 923 = 999
1/17 = 0.0588235294117647 …
05882352 + 94117647 = 99999999
1/19 = 0.052631578947368421 …
052631578 + 947368421 = 999999999
Lament
Letter to the Times, March 10, 1995:
Sir,
There doesn’t seem very much left for us agnostics not to believe in.
Yours faithfully,
Richard Crawford
(But Graham Chapman said, “There’s really nothing an agnostic can’t do if he really doesn’t know whether he believes in anything or not.”)
Two Solutions
[O]ur self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus,
Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890
Constitution
A sobering problem from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s Book of Modern Puzzles, 1954:
If a GLEEPER is as long as two PLONTHS and a half-GLEEPER, and a BLAHMIE is as long as two GLEEPERS and a half-BLAHMIE, and a POOSTER is as long as two BLAHMIES and a half-POOSTER, then how many PLONTHS long is a half-POOSTER?
“It may help you to make a sketch.”
Suggestion
As to your method of work, I have a single bit of advice, which I give with the earnest conviction of its paramount influence in any success which may have attended my efforts in life — Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition. That was a singular but very wise answer which Cromwell gave to Bellevire — ‘No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going,’ and there is much truth in it. The student who is worrying about his future, anxious over the examinations, doubting his fitness for the profession, is certain not to do so well as the man who cares for nothing but the matter in hand, and who knows not whither he is going!
— William Osler, advice to students, McGill College, 1899
Overspecialized Words
Some words become famous for their implausibly specific definitions:
ucalegon: a neighbor whose house is on fire
nosarian: one who argues that there is no limit to the possible largeness of a nose
undoctor: to make unlike a doctor
Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, collects examples ranging from atpatruus (“a great-grandfather’s grandfather’s brother”) to zumbooruk (“a small cannon fired from the back of a camel”). My own favorite is groak, “to watch people silently while they’re eating, hoping they will ask you to join them.”
Alas, most of these don’t appear in the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary. Accordingly, in 1981 Jeff Grant burrowed his way into the OED in a deliberate search for obscure words. When he reached the end of A he sent his 10 favorite finds to the British magazine Logophile:
acersecomic: one whose hair was never cut
acroteriasm: the act of cutting off the extreme parts of the body, when putrefied, with a saw
alerion: an eagle without beak or feet
all-flower-water: cow’s urine, as a remedy
ambilevous: left-handed on both sides
amphisbaenous: walking equally in opposite directions
andabatarian: struggling while blindfolded
anemocracy: government by wind
artolatry: the worship of bread
autocoprophagous: eating one’s own dung
“I have been working slowly through ‘B’ and so far my favourite is definitely ‘bangstry’, defined as ‘masterful violence’, an obsolete term that is surely overdue for a comeback.”
(From Word Ways, November 1981.)