“Ballade of Soporific Absorption”

Ho! Ho! Yes! Yes! It’s very all well,
You may drunk I am think, but I tell you I’m not,
I’m as sound as a fiddle and fit as a bell,
And stable quite ill to see what’s what.
I under do stand you surprise a got
When I headed my smear with gooseberry jam;
And I’ve swallowed, I grant, a beer of lot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Can I liquor my stand? Why, yes, like hell!
I care not how many a tossed I’ve pot,
I shall stralk quite weight and not yutter an ell,
My feech will not spalter the least little jot:
If you knownly had own! — well, I gave him a dot,
And I said to him, ‘Sergeant, I’ll come like a lamb —
The floor it seems like a storm in a yacht,
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.”

For example, to prove it I’ll tale you a tell —
I once knew a fellow named Apricot —
I’m sorry, I just chair over a fell —
A trifle — this chap, on a very day hot —
If I hadn’t consumed that last whisky of tot! —
As I said now, this fellow, called Abraham —
Ah? One more? Since it’s you! Just a do me will spot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Envoi

So, Prince, you suggest I’ve bolted my shot?
Well, like what you say, and soul your damn!
I’m an upple litset by the talk you rot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

— J.C. Squire

| Poems

Speak, Memory

A puzzling passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin:

Pnin’s birthday … fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen — no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

This describes the novelist’s own confusing situation. He’d been born in Saint Petersburg on April 10, 1899, in the Julian calendar, which corresponds to April 22, 1899, in the Gregorian. (Russia didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.) The turn of the century added a further wrinkle: The offset between the two calendars increased from 12 to 13 days for dates occurring after February 1900. Properly this had no effect on earlier dates, so Nabokov’s birthday should always have been reckoned April 22, but some confused writers began to give it as April 23, and eventually that’s when he began to celebrate it himself — as he told interviewers, it meant he now shared a birthday with both William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple.

(Though he nowhere explains it, “motuweth frisas” refers to the days of the week, the most familiar rhythm of an academic’s life.)

| Literature

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