Still Waiting

In a 1901 parody edition, the journal Mind! offered £1,000 to any philosopher who could produce adequate documentary evidence that he:

  1. Knows what he means.
  2. Knows what anyone else means.
  3. Knows what everyone means.
  4. Knows what anything means.
  5. Knows what everything else means.
  6. Means what he says.
  7. Means what he means.
  8. Means what everyone else means.
  9. Means what everyone else says that he means.
  10. Can express what he means.
  11. Knows what it signifies what he means.
  12. Knows what it matters what he signifies.

“At first sight it might seem as though the Twelve Labours of Hercules would be in comparison with this a slighter achievement,” the editors wrote. “But in view of the extensive and peculiar knowledge of the Absolute’s Mind which is now possessed by so many philosophers, a large number of solutions may confidently be expected.”

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Minimalism

https://books.google.com/books?id=oTAYAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA193

There are several simple little drawing tricks which the nurse may use to arouse the interest of her patient as she uses puzzles and catches. The oldest of these is by Hogarth and represents a soldier and his dog going through a doorway. As is seen by the diagram, it consists of three straight lines and one curved one.

— William Rush Dunton, Occupation Therapy, 1915

In the 1950s, humorist Roger Price invented “Droodles,” simple enigmatic drawings explained by their captions. Frank Zappa used one on the cover of a 1982 album:

zappa droodle cover

It’s called Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.

| Art · Humor

Correspondence

Excerpts from letters received by the British pensions office, quoted in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002:

  • Mrs R. has no clothes, has not had any for many years. The clergy have been visiting her.
  • In reply to your letter, I have already cohabited with your officers, so far without any result.
  • You have changed my little boy to a little girl. Will this make any difference?
  • Please send money at once, as I have fallen in errors with my landlord.
  • I have no children, as my husband is a bus-driver and works all day and night.
  • In accordance with your instructions, I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope.
  • I have been in bed with the doctor for a week, and he does not seem to be doing me any good. If things don’t improve I shall have to get another doctor.
  • Milk is wanted for the baby, and the father is unable to supply it.
  • The teeth on top are all right, but the ones in my bottom are hurting terribly.
| Humor

“Almost Too Ceremonious”

A gentleman walked up to another gentleman, who was standing before the fire in a Coffee Room, and immediately said, ‘I beg your pardon, Sir, but may I ask your name?’ ‘I am not in the habit, Sir,’ said the other man, ‘of giving my name to strangers, but, as you are so pertinacious, Sir, my name is Thompson, Sir.’ ‘Then, Mr. Thompson, Sir,’ said the first speaker, ‘now I know your name, I beg, Sir, to inform you that your coat tails are on fire.’

— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879

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Zoology

Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast:

The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.

— Ernest Gowers and Sir Bruce Fraser, The Complete Plain Words, 1973

| Humor · Science & Math

A Smile More Brightened

In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:

[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]

Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”

(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)

| Humor · Literature · Poems

The Other Half

Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual:

Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.”

John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.”

John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.”

Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.”

James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”)

Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog; malice.”

Frederic Raphael: “Painting things white.”

Constant Hendrick de Waal: “Remaining (so far as possible) unaware of current events.”

Keith Waterhouse: “Lunch.”

Roy Worskett: “Looking and listening in disbelief.”

In 1897 George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as “cycling and showing off.” In 1980 Sir Harold Hobson listed “Bridge; recollecting in regretful tranquillity the magical things and people I may never see again — the Grand Véfour, Lasserre, Beaumanière; Proust’s Grand Hotel at Balbec (Cabourg); Sunday afternoon teas at the Ritz; the theatrical bookshop in St Germain-des-Prés; the Prado; Edwige Feuillère, Madeleine Renauld, Jean-Louis Barrault, François Perier; collecting from ephemera of the Belle Epoque the cartoons of Steinlen; and always and inexhaustibly talking to my wife.”

(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)

02/05/2025 UPDATE: John Cleese lists his as “gluttony and sloth.” (Thanks, Bryan.)

| Humor · Society

Call of the Wild

I heard the story — but I cannot verify it — that Marshall Lyautey (1854-1934) owned a parrot which incorporated these words in its vocabulary: What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening! and often repeated them in earnest.

Now one day the renowned soldier, on returning home, was greeted by the same interjection which seemed so in keeping with the fine evening. But what was his astonishment when he found himself before the spectacle presented by his bird. The parrot, which had spent the evening alone with a monkey, had been entirely defeathered by his everyday household companion. ‘What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening!’, in that context, took on a droll and ironic meaning.

— Elian Finbert, Les Perroquets Vous Parlent, 1975, quoted in George Gardner Herrick, Winter Rules, 1997

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