“The Ingenious Patriot”

Having obtained an audience of the King an Ingenious Patriot pulled a paper from his pocket, saying:

‘May it please your Majesty, I have here a formula for constructing armor plating that no gun can pierce. If these plates are adopted in the Royal Navy our warships will be invulnerable and therefore invincible. Here, also, are reports of your Majesty’s Ministers, attesting the value of the invention. I will part with my right in it for a million tumtums.’

After examining the papers, the King put them away and promised him an order on the Lord High Treasurer of the Extortion Department for a million tumtums.

‘And here,’ said the Ingenious Patriot, pulling another paper from another pocket, ‘are the working plans of a gun that I have invented, which will pierce that armor. Your Majesty’s royal brother, the Emperor of Bang, is eager to purchase it, but loyalty to your Majesty’s throne and person constrains me to offer it first to your Majesty. The price is one million tumtums.’

Having received the promise of another check, he thrust his hand into still another pocket, remarking:

‘The price of the irresistible gun would have been much greater, your Majesty, but for the fact that its missiles can be so effectively averted by my peculiar method of treating the armor plates with a new –‘

The King signed to the Great Head Factotum to approach.

‘Search this man,’ he said, ‘and report how many pockets he has.’

‘Forty-three, Sire,’ said the Great Head Factotum, completing the scrutiny.

‘May it please your Majesty,’ cried the Ingenious Patriot, in terror, ‘one of them contains tobacco.’

‘Hold him up by the ankles and shake him,’ said the King; ‘then give him a check for forty-two million tumtums and put him to death. Let a decree issue making ingenuity a capital offence.’

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

| Literature · Society

The Arc of Narrative

In 2020, three researchers from UT Austin and Lancaster University examined 40,000 fictional narratives and discovered a consistent linguistic pattern. Articles and prepositions such as a and the are common at the start of a story, where they set the stage by providing information about people, places, and things. As the plot progresses, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and pronouns become more common — words that are action-oriented and social. Near the end, “cognitive tension words” such as think, realize, and because become more common, words that reflect people trying to make sense of their world.

These patterns are consistent across novels, short stories, and amateur (“off-the-cuff”) stories. “If we want to connect with an audience, we have to appreciate what information they need, but don’t yet have,” said lead author Ryan Boyd. “At the most fundamental level, humans need a flood of ‘logic language’ at the beginning of a story to make sense of it, followed by a rising stream of ‘action’ information to convey the actual plot of the story.”

At this website you can view the graphs produced by various example narratives and even analyze your own.

(Ryan L. Boyd, Kate G. Blackburn, and James W. Pennebaker, “The Narrative Arc: Revealing Core Narrative Structures Through Text Analysis,” Science Advances 6:32 [2020], eaba2196.) (Thanks, Sharon.)

| Literature · Science & Math

A Glimpse

In his later years Joseph Conrad became obsessed with the opening scene of an unwritten novel that he planned to set in an Eastern European state. “So vividly used he to describe this scene to me,” wrote his friend Richard Curle, “that at last it was as though I had been a witness to it myself”:

“In the courtyard of a royal palace, brilliantly lighted up as for a festival, soldiers are bivouacked in the snow. And inside the palace a fateful council is taking place and the destiny of the country is being decided.”

“I never learned anything more about this novel — I do not know how far Conrad had himself visualized the plot,” Curle wrote, “but as he pictured that opening scene one could almost feel the tension in the air and one almost seemed to be warming one’s hands with the soldiers around their blazing fire.”

(Richard Curle, The Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad, 1928.)

| Literature

Rivers

https://books.google.com/books?id=mE6BFXd6ppsC&pg=PA426

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them.

In ordinary text long rivers are unlikely, but in 1988 Mark Isaak found the 12-line example above on page 277 of the Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (squint to see it).

Fritzi Striebel offered a small collection of unusual rivers at the end of this article in the May 1986 issue of Word Ways.

| Literature · Technology

A Day’s Work

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968):

  • “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”)
  • “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “And then, from the doorway, a gun barked: ‘Chow-chow!’ and I went drifting to dreamland.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “The rod sneezed: ‘Chow! Ka-Chow!’ and pushed two pills through Reggie’s left thigh.” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “Against a backdrop of darkness the heater sneezed: Ka-Chowp! Chowp! Chowp! and sent three sparking ribbons of orange flame burning into the pillow.” (“Come Die for Me”)
  • “From the window behind her, a roscoe poked under the drawn blind. It went: ‘Blooey — Blooey — Blooey!’” (“Murder on the Sound Stage”)
  • “From the window that opened onto the roof-top sun deck a roscoe sneezed: Ka-Chow! Chowpf! and a red-hot hornet creased its stinger across my dome; bashed me to dreamland.” (“Lake of the Left-Hand Moon”)
  • “From the front doorway of the wigwam a roscoe stuttered: Ka-chow! Chow! Chow! and a red-hot slug maced me across the back of the cranium, knocked me into the middle of nowhere.” (“Killer’s Keepsake”)
  • “A while ago you mentioned my hardboiled rep. You said I’m considered a dangerous hombre to monkey with. Okay, you’re right. Now will you come along willingly or do I bunt you over the crumpet till your sneezer leaks buttermilk?” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the prop man’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller. A bullet can give a man a terrific case of indigestion, frequently ending in a trip to the boneyard.” (“Diamonds of Death”)
  • “‘Dan Turner squalling,’ I yeeped. ‘Flag your diapers to Sylvia Hempstead’s igloo. There’s been a croaking.'” (“Come Die for Me”)

“From the doorway a roscoe said ‘Kachow!’ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank. … She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose. … I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.”

| Literature

A Poem

Sydney Smith wrote a recipe for salad dressing:

Two boiled potatoes, strained through a kitchen sieve,
Softness and smoothness to the salad give;
Of mordant mustard take a single spoon —
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
True taste requires it, and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onions’ atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And lastly in the flavoured compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh, great and glorious! oh, herbaceous meat!
‘Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat.
Back to the world he’d turn his weary soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl.

In the late 19th century, such rhymes helped cooks to master recipes. When this one was reproduced in an 1871 cookbook, many committed it to memory.

| History · Literature · Poems

In a Word

philomath
n. a lover of learning; a scholar

noddary
n. a foolish act

fedifragous
adj. contract-breaking

subitaneous
adj. sudden

In Fredric Brown’s 1954 short short story “Experiment,” Professor Johnson displays a brass cube and proposes to send it backward in time. An identical cube appears in his time machine at 2:55, and Johnson announces that at 3:00 he will complete the transaction by sending his own cube 5 minutes into the past.

A friend asks: What would happen if he changed his mind and didn’t send it?

“An interesting idea,” says the professor. “I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not …”

“There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.

“But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.”

| Language · Literature