In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Union-rat.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

obtest
v. to call heaven to witness; to protest against

proditor
n. a traitor; a betrayer

Is a union breaking the law if it posts a giant inflatable rat outside an employer’s facility? No, it’s not, according to a 2011 decision by the National Labor Relations Board. The Sheet Metal Workers’ Union had sought to dissuade a hospital from using non-union workers by stationing a 16-foot rat near the building’s entrance. The NLRB held that the “the use of the stationary Giant Rat (i) constituted peaceful and constitutionally protectable expression, (ii) did not involve confrontational conduct that would qualify as unlawful picketing, and (iii) did not qualify as nonpicketing conduct that was otherwise unlawfully coercive.”

The “rat collosi” are multiplying (gallery). Let’s hope they don’t stage an uprising themselves someday.

| Language · Society

False Start

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean_Louis_Th%C3%A9odore_G%C3%A9ricault_001.jpg

The horse raced past the barn fell.

That’s a grammatically correct sentence. What does it mean? Most readers have to puzzle over it a bit before seeing the interpretation

The horse [that was] raced past the barn fell.

This is a “garden-path sentence” — the reader naturally assumes one interpretation and is confused to find that another had been intended. Further examples:

The old man the boat.

The government plans to raise taxes were defeated.

The cotton clothing is made of grows in Alabama.

I convinced her children are noisy.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

In writing, lexicographer Henry Fowler calls it “an obvious folly — so obvious that no one commits it wittingly except when surprise is designed to amuse. But writers are apt to forget that, if the false scent is there, it is no excuse to say they did not intend to lay it; it is their business to see that it is not there, and this requires more care than might be supposed.”

| Language

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_story_of_the_greatest_nations,_from_the_dawn_of_history_to_the_twentieth_century_-_a_comprehensive_history,_founded_upon_the_leading_authorities,_including_a_complete_chronology_of_the_world,_and_(14586608739).jpg

  • FRENCH REVOLUTION is an anagram of VIOLENCE RUN FORTH.
  • Aldous Huxley was George Orwell’s French teacher.
  • West Side Story was originally called East Side Story.
  • The Labrador dog is from Newfoundland, and the Newfoundland dog is from Labrador.
  • “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” — Wilson Mizner
| Art · Language · Literature · Quotations · Trivia

Legerdemain

Apart from being mathematically true, ONE + TWELVE = TWO + ELEVEN is also famously an anagram — the same group of letters appears on each side of the expression.

In numerical form (1 + 12 = 2 + 11) it’s both an anagram and a palindrome — the same numerals appear on either side of the equal sign, and in opposite order.

Expressed in Roman numerals (I + XII = II + XI) it remains an anagram and a palindrome — again, the same numerals appear on both sides, and in reverse order.

In a square font the equation remains the same when each character is turned upside down:

legerdemain 1

In Word Ways, contributor Anil points out a further coincidence: Write the original equation in a square font, turn it upside down, and twist the first plus sign 45 degrees to make a multiplication sign:

legerdemain 2

A similar trick works in Roman numerals: Start with the original expression, turn it upside down, and change the plus signs to minus. If IIX is taken as 8, then we get another valid expression:

I + XII = II + XI
IX + II = IIX + I
IX – II = IIX – I

(Anil, “One + Twelve = Two + Eleven,” Word Ways 35:4 [July 2012], 308. See also Spanagrams and Immortal Truth.)

| Language

Self-Service

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Honor%C3%A9_Daumier_-_Dandy.jpeg

A Mrs. Harris published this verse in Golden Days on Oct. 10, 1885:

He squanders recklessly his cash
In cultivating a mustache;
A shameless fop is Mr. Dude,
Vain, shallow, fond of being viewed.
‘Tis true that he is quite a swell —
A smile he has for every belle;
What time he has to spare from dress
Is taken up with foolishness —
A witless youth, whose feeble brain
Incites him oft to chew his cane.
Leave dudes alone, nor ape their ways,
Male readers of these Golden Days.

It reads so naturally that it’s surprising to find that it contains a double acrostic: Taking the fourth letter of each line spells out QUANTITATIVE, and taking the last letter spells out HEEDLESSNESS.

| Language · Poems · Society

Ready-Made

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Testu_1556_4th_projection.jpg

Australia was named before it was discovered. Ancient geographers had supposed that land in the north must be balanced by land in the south — Aristotle had written, “there must be a region bearing the same relation to the southern pole as the place we live in bears to our pole” — and Romans told legends of a Terra Australis Incognita, an “unknown land of the South,” more than a millennium before Europeans first sighted the continent.

In 1814 the British explorer Matthew Flinders suggested applying the speculative name, Terra Australis, to the actual place — and in a footnote he wrote, “Had I permitted myself any innovation on the original term, it would have been to convert it to AUSTRALIA; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.”

| History · Language · Oddities

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fanciulla_sulla_roccia_a_Sorrento.jpg

celsitude
n. height; elevation; altitude

faineant
n. one who does nothing; an idler

ataraxia
n. a pleasure that comes when the mind is at rest

| Language