A Bouquet

A surprising number of flowers are named for people:

  • begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)
  • camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel
  • dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus
  • forsythia: after Scottish botanist William Forsyth
  • fuchsia: after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
  • gardenia: after Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden
  • magnolia: after French botanist Pierre Magnol
  • poinsettia: after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who is credited with bringing the flower to the United States
  • wisteria: after American physician Caspar Wistar
  • zinnia: after German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn

The ackee fruit of Jamaica is named Blighia sapida after William Bligh, who discovered it in his travels after the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

(Via Maxwell W. Nurnberg, Wonders in Words, 1968.)

| Language

Oops

In 1848, English poet Arthur Hugh Clough named a new work The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, apparently thinking this was an innocent Gaelic place name. The Literary Gazette informed him that it means “the hut of the bearded well” — it’s a Highland toast to the female genitalia.

“Red-faced and embarrassed, Clough was nevertheless ribald enough to giggle delightedly over the appallingly ludicrous way in which he had introduced such unseemliness into ‘all the drawing rooms and boudoirs (of course) of all the world,'” notes author Robindra Kumar Biswas.

On republishing the poem, Clough changed the name to the appropriately meaningless Tober-na-Vuolich.

| Literature

Impostors

“Plaindromes” are ordinary sentences that sound as if they ought to be palindromes:

Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.
Stella, Otis deified Satan and Edna.
An item? No, revolt took Natasha.
Eggbert, a wry dross needs seating, tea-grams.
Droop: an old fan? Needles fone a poor ode.

“Ungrams” are invalid anagrams:

Richard M. Nixon / Noxious charmer
Brooklyn Bridge / Good ride by lake

Both were invented by Jef Raskin of Cupertino, California (from the August 2010 issue of Word Ways).

| Language

Four Seasons

Flemish engraver Aegidius Sadeler II based these prints on designs by Pieter Stevens II. Spring:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Spring.jpg

Summer:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Summer.jpg

Autumn:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Autumn.jpg

Winter:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Winter.jpg

One year is sufficient to behold all the magnificence of nature, nay, even one day and night; for more is but the same brought again. This sun, that moon, these stars, the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter, is that very same which the golden age did see. They which have the longest time lent them to live in, have almost no part of it at all, measuring it either by the space of time which is past, when they were not, or by that which is to come. Why shouldst thou then care whether thy days be many or few, which, when prolonged to the uttermost, prove, paralleled with eternity, as a tear is to the ocean? To die young, is to do that soon, and in some fewer days, which once thou must do; it is but the giving over of a game, that after never so many hazards, must be lost.

— William Drummond of Hawthornden, A Cypress Grove, 1623

| Art

Fare Division

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16580
Image: ArXiv

There are four states in which matter can exist: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Similarly, in an April Fools’ Day paper in 2022, Harvard’s Madelyn Leembruggen and Caroline Martin proposed that foods can be classified as soup, salad, or sandwich:

  • “Soups are a suspension of ingredients in a liquid matrix, whereas salads are a suspension of ingredients in a gaseous matrix.” Thus cereal is soup, and mixed nuts are salad. The transition between phases is continuous: Depending on how finely they’re chopped, the same set of ingredients might produce a chunky salad, a salsa, or a gazpacho. Vanilla ice cream is a “glassy” soup because it doesn’t flow at its serving temperature, but it takes on a more liquid character as it melts.
  • A soup or salad becomes a sandwich when it’s enclosed in a carbohydrate. The shape and quality of the carbohydrate must vary according to the substance it encloses, but a proposed general rule is that if you can pick up a dish by the carb and eat it, it’s a sandwich.

Further investigation is needed into some edge cases (e.g., lasagna vs. baked ziti), but in most cases a lot of ground can be covered by just asking “Is this a soup, a salad, or a sandwich?” “Most of the time, the answer you blurt out with the least amount of thought is the most true.”

“Finally, to remove any of the reader’s lingering uncertainty: yes, a hotdog is a sandwich.”

(Madelyn Leembruggen and Caroline Martin, “What’s for Lunch? A Systematic Ordering of Foods in the Soup-Salad-Sandwich Phase Space,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.16580 [2022].)

| Humor · Science & Math

A Blow to Tourism

Anglican priest Samuel Peters opposed American independence and was forced to flee the colonies as the revolution approached. From London he exacted a sort of revenge by publishing a list of 45 draconian laws that he said prevailed in Connecticut, in an attempt to make the colonies look backward and fanatical. Among the sterner measures:

  • No one to cross a river, but with an authorized ferryman.
  • No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting.
  • No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave, on the Sabbath day.
  • No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
  • When it appears that an accused has confederates, and he refuses to discover them, he may be racked.
  • Whoever wears clothes trimmed with gold, silver, or bone lace, above two shillings by the yard, shall be presented by the grand jurors, and the selectmen shall tax the offender at £300 estate.
  • A debtor in prison, swearing he has no estate, shall be let out and sold, to make satisfaction.
  • No one shall read Common-Prayer, keep Christmas or saints-days, make minced pies, dance, play cards, or play on any instrument of music, except the drum, trumpet, and the jaw harp.
  • The selectmen, on finding children ignorant, may take them away from their parents, and put them into better hands, at the expense of their parents.
  • Married persons must live together, or be imprisoned.
  • Every male shall have his hair cut round according to a cap.

The full list is here. Peters’ hoax did have one lasting effect — it popularized the term “blue laws” to describe laws that restrict activity on Sunday.

| History · Hoaxes · Society

Bad Stanzas

From William Wordsworth, “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”:

Of waistcoats Harry has no lack,
Good duffle grey, and flannel fine;
He has a blanket on his back,
And coats enough to smother nine.

From Charles Wesley, “On the Sight of a Corpse”:

Ah lovely appearance of Death!
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare.

From Richard Le Gallienne, “Beauty Accurst”:

The sleepy kine move round me in desire
And press their oozy lips upon my hair,
Toads kiss my feet and creatures of the mire,
The snails will leave their shells to watch me there.

From John Scott of Amwell, “To a Friend, Apprehensive of Declining Friendship”:

Too much in man’s imperfect state
Mistake produces useless pain.–
Methinks, of friendship’s frequent fate
I hear my Frogley’s voice complain.

From Isaac Watts, “On the Sudden Death of Mrs. Mary Peacock”:

Hark! she bids all her friends adieu;
Some angel calls her to the spheres;
Our eyes the radiant saint pursue
Through liquid telescopes of tears.

In The Stuffed Owl, D. B. Wyndham Lewis quotes this anonymous verse:

I always knew what sort of weather
We were going to have,
For Cynthia never wore her feather
When the weather would be bad.

But when the days were warm and bright
Cynthia wore a feather,
Sometimes black and sometimes white,
The colour doesn’t count whatever.

| Poems

Dinner for One

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evolution_eye.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In humans, each eye has a small blind spot corresponding to the point where the optic nerve leaves the retina. Normally this isn’t noticeable because the brain can fill in the gap with information from the other eye. But by closing one eye and positioning the target at the appropriate angle, it’s possible to invoke the gap deliberately.

“When the famous physiological psychologist Karl S. Lashley was forced to endure an irritating dinner guest, he amused himself by bringing his blind spot over the person’s head, neatly decapitating the person.”

— Jearl Walker, The Flying Circus of Physics, 2006

| Science & Math

Synopsis

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maze-05_Barcelona_Parc_del_Laberint_(system_of_paths_and_nodes).PNG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Mazes are designed to be tortuous, so even a published solution can be hard to follow. A “straight-line diagram” dispenses with the windings and converts the essential puzzle in a simple map that’s easy to interpret:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maze-06_Barcelona_Parc_del_Laberint_(straight_line_diagram).PNG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

This example summarizes the hedge maze in Barcelona’s Parc del Laberint d’Horta.

The same can be done with any meandering route — many subways have adopted stylized maps that dispense with geography and focus on the order of stops, the most important detail for most commuters.

| Science & Math