Wild Life

Some personal names used in the land moiety of the Miwok people of Northern California, listed in Brian Bibby’s Deeper Than Gold: Indian Life in the Sierra Foothills, 2005:

akaino: bear holding its head up
engeto: bear bending its foot in a particular manner while walking
esege: bear showing its teeth when cross
etumu: bear warming itself in the sun
sutuluye: bear making noise climbing up a tree
hateya: bear making tracks in the dust
katcuktcume: bear lying down with paws folded, doing nothing
laapisak: bear walking on one place making ground hard
lilepu: bear going over a man hiding between rocks
mo’emu: bears sitting down looking at each other
peeluyak: bear flapping its ears while sitting down
sapata: bear dancing with forefeet around trunk of a tree
tulmisuye: bear walking slowly and gently
utnepa: bear rolling rock with foot when pursuing something
yelutci: bear traveling among rocks and brush without making noise
notaku: growling of bear as someone passes
tulanu: two or three bears taking food from one another
semuki: bear looking cross when in its den
molimo: bear going into shade of trees
tcumela: bears dancing in the hills

Edward Winslow Gifford gives another list in Miwok Moieties, 1916.

| Language

Around the World

Paris newspapers once carried an ad offering a cheap and pleasant way of travelling for the price of 25 centimes. Several simpletons mailed this sum. Each received a letter of the following content:

‘Sir, rest at peace in bed and remember that the earth turns. At the 49th parallel — that of Paris — you travel more than 25,000 km a day. Should you want a nice view, draw your curtain aside and admire the starry sky.’

The man who sent these letters was found and tried for fraud. The story goes that after quietly listening to the verdict and paying the fine demanded, the culprit struck a theatrical pose and solemnly declared, repeating Galileo’s famous words: ‘It turns.’

— Yakov Perelman, Physics for Entertainment, 1913

| Hoaxes · Science & Math

“The Fence”

There was a fence with spaces you
Could look through if you wanted to.

An architect who saw this thing
Stood there one summer evening,

Took out the spaces with great care
And built a castle in the air.

The fence was utterly dumbfounded:
Each post stood there with nothing round it.

A sight most terrible to see.
(They charged it with indecency.)

The architect then ran away
To Afric- or Americ-ay.

— Christian Morgenstern

| Poems

On Your Own

“Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.” — Shaw

| Society

Endangered Species

Kevin Purbhoo invented this vivid puzzle while a student at Northern Secondary School in Toronto:

On a remote Norwegian mountain top, there is a huge checkerboard, 1000 squares wide and 1000 squares long, surrounded by steep cliffs to the north, south, east, and west. Each square is marked with an arrow pointing in one of the eight compass directions, so (with the possible exception of some squares on the edges) each square has an arrow pointing to one of its eight nearest neighbors. The arrows on squares sharing an edge differ by at most 45 degrees. A lemming is placed randomly on one of the squares, and it jumps from square to square following the arrows. Prove that the poor creature will eventually plunge from a cliff to its death.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Doubt

A remarkable number of apparently intelligent people are baffled by the fact that a different group of apparently intelligent people profess to a knowledge of God when common sense tells them — the first group of apparently intelligent people — that knowledge is only a possibility in matters that can be demonstrated to be true or false, such as that the Bristol train leaves from Paddington. And yet these same apparently intelligent people, who in extreme cases will not even admit that the Bristol train left from Paddington yesterday — which might be a malicious report or a collective trick of memory — nor that it will leave from there tomorrow — for nothing is certain — and will only agree that it did so today if they were actually there when it left — and even then only on the understanding that all the observable phenomena associated with the train leaving Paddington could equally well be accounted for by Paddington leaving the train — these same people will, nevertheless, and without any sense of inconsistency, claim to know that life is better than death, that love is better than hate, and that the light shining through the east window of their bloody gymnasium is more beautiful than a rotting corpse!

— Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 1972

| Religion · Society

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

Roll Call

Unusual personal names collected by the Society for the Verification and Enjoyment of Fascinating Names of Actual Persons, listed by curator Allan Fotheringham in 1991:

  • Procter R. Hug
  • Polly Wanda Crocker
  • Sexious Boonjug
  • Philander Philpott Pettibone
  • Zilpher Spittle
  • Petrus J.G. Prink
  • Burke Uzzle
  • Pansy Reamsbottom
  • Dunwoody Zook
  • Bastion Hello
  • Fang W. Wang
  • Montague Tyrwhitt-Drake
  • Nimrod Spong
  • Dulcie Pillage
  • Jake Moak
  • Sir Tufton Beamish
  • Sir Basil Smallpiece
  • Sir Malby Crofton
  • St. Bodfan Grufydd
  • Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax
  • Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes
  • Selmer Hafso
  • Addylou Ebfisty Plunt
  • Oscar U. Zerk
  • Titus Cranny
  • Noble Puffer
  • J. Flipper Derricoate
  • Ovid Parody
  • J. Boxter Funderback
  • Middlebrook Polly
  • Lester Ouchmoody
  • Spencer Hum
  • A. Smerling Lecher

SVEFNAP founder Clyde Gilmour dreamed of assembling a golf foursome of Luke Feck, Bosh Stack, Fice Mork, and M. Tugrul Uke. “Gilmour imagined himself doing the introductions: ‘Feck, this is Stack. Stack … Mork. Mork … Uke. Uke … Feck …”

| Oddities

The Constitution State

What do you call a person from Connecticut? Today we’d call them a Connecticuter or a Connecticutian (or, colloquially, a Nutmegger), but in a 1987 address etymologist Allen Walker Read announced that he’d also found these options:

  • Connecticotian, used in 1702 by Cotton Mather
  • Connecticutensian, used in 1781 by historian Samuel Peters
  • Connectican, used in 1942 in a letter to the Baltimore Evening Sun
  • Connecticutan, used in 1946 by book reviewer John Cournos
  • Connecticutite, used in 1968 by an anonymous reviewer in Playboy

He also found several jocular forms:

  • Connecticutie, a pretty girl of Connecticut (used in 1938 by Frank Sullivan of Mrs. Heywood Broun and in 1947 by a journalist about Clare Boothe Luce)
  • Connecticanuck, a Connecticut person of French background
  • Connectikook, an oddball or eccentric from Connecticut
  • Connecticutup, a prankster from Connecticut

“Especially in language, exuberance accounts for much that happens.”

(Allen Walker Read, “Exuberance, a Motivation for Language,” (Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 71-74. He gives his documentation in “What Connecticut People Can Call Themselves,” Connecticut Onomastic Review No. 2, 1981, 3­-23. In 1992 he took up the same question regarding “Americans.”)

| Language