“Genuine works of art carry their own aesthetic theory implicit within them and suggest the standards according to which they are to be judged.” — Goethe, letter, 1808
Dead Man’s Chest
Five pirates of different ages want to divide a treasure of 100 gold coins. They agree that the oldest among them will propose how to divide the coins, and then all the pirates will vote on the proposal. If more than half the pirates support it, it will be adopted and the coins distributed accordingly. Otherwise the proposer will be thrown overboard and the process repeated with the remaining pirates.
If all five pirates are smart, rational, greedy, and fearful of death, what will happen?
Morton’s Fork
John Morton, Lord Chancellor under Henry VII, used a universal argument to demand gifts for the royal treasury:
- If a man lived well, he was obviously rich.
- If a man lived modestly, he obviously had savings.
Either way, he could afford the tax. Francis Bacon wrote, “There is a tradition of a dilemma that Bishop Morton … used to raise up the benevolence to higher rates; and some called it his Fork.”
Frugal
In 1884, zoologist William Hay Caldwell sent a historic cable from Australia to his colleagues at the British Association for the Advancement of Science:
MONOTREMES OVIPAROUS, OVUM MEROBLASTIC
In four words this manages to proclaim that the platypus lays eggs and that the early stages of its embryo formation resemble those seen in birds and reptiles rather than mammals.
His and Hers
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print — I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
… A tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female — tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it — for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
— Mark Twain (from A Tramp Abroad)
Spin Doctor
I have 13 magnetic tapes on reels; one empty reel; and a machine that can unwind a tape from a full reel onto an empty one, reversing the tape’s direction. I need to reverse the direction of each tape while leaving it on its original reel. Can this be done?
Miniature
If there were only two men in the world, how would they get on? They would help one another, harm one another, flatter one another, slander one another, fight one another, make it up; they could neither live together nor do without one another. They would act just as all men do today. They possess the gift of reason — yes — but they also possess the gift of instinct; and they will feel, and reason, and act always as nature has destined them to do.
— Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764
Oh, Thank You
There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them. That’s a natural-enough-sounding expression, but it’s also a peculiar thing to say.
“[T]he verb is the highly ordinary are,” noted philosopher J.L. Austin in 1956, “but the if is more like that in ‘I can if I choose’ than that in ‘I panted if I ran’: for we can certainly infer from it that ‘There are biscuits on the sideboard whether you want them or not’ and that anyway ‘There are biscuits on the sideboard’, whereas it would be folly to infer that ‘If there are no biscuits on the sideboard you do not want them’, or to understand the meaning to be that you have only to want biscuits to cause them to be on the sideboard.”
Delightfully, such expressions are called biscuit conditionals.
For Short
The man with the longest surname in Fiji is Levani Mavoaiuluivitimaitaveunienanodralakicakacakatakanavalenilotunagon
enivadravadraenaesitetimaiuraqaicuruvularuaenavaleniveivakabulaimaiwaiyevoenayasanakocakaudrove.
It means “injured (mavoa) while on Taveuni when the people of Vadravadra went to work at Ura Estate where he got injured and was later admitted for two months at the Waiyevo Hospital in the province of Cakaudrove.” It was given to him deliberately to set the record.
He goes by Levani Mavoa. “I can remember my date of birth,” he told the Fiji Times, “but I cannot remember my full name.”
A Magic Globe
In 1917, W.S. Andrews inscribed a sphere with five circles of latitude and six of longitude.
Then he arranged the numbers 1 to 62 on the intersections such that each of the 11 circles bears 12 numbers totaling 378.