“The Farmer’s Life”

The farmer leads no E Z life,
The C D sows will rot,
And when at E V rests from strife
His bosom will A K lot.

In D D has to struggle hard
to E K living out,
If I C frosts do not retard
His crops, there’ll B A drought.

The hired L P has to pay
Are awful A Z too;
They C K rest when he’s away,
Nor N E work will do.

Both N Z cannot make to meet,
And then for A D takes
Some boarders, who so R T eat,
That E no money makes.

Of little U C finds this life,
Sick in old A G lies;
The debts he O Z leaves his wife,
And then in P C dies.

Stenography, January 1887

Long Distance

https://galton.org/essays/1890-1899/galton-1893-diff-1up.pdf

Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet. At a lecture the following year he described more specifically a method by which pictures might be encoded using 26 alphabetical characters, which could then be transmitted over a distance in 5-character “words,” in effect creating a low-resolution visual telegraph. As a study he reduced this profile of a Greek girl to 271 coded dots, which he found yielded “a very creditable production.”

This had huge implications, he felt. In 1896 he imagined a whole correspondence with a civilization of intelligent ants on Mars; in three and a half hours they catch our attention; teach us their base-8 mathematical notation; demonstrate their shared understanding of certain celestial bodies and mathematical constants; and finally propose a specified 24-gon in which points can be situated by code, like stitches in a piece of embroidery.

That opens a limitless avenue for colloquy — the Martians send images of Saturn, Earth, the solar system, and domestic and sociological drawings, a new one every evening. Galton concludes that two astronomical bodies that are close enough to signal one another with flashes of light already have everything they need to establish “an efficient inter-stellar language.”

In a Word

nimiety
n. superfluity

brachylogy
n. a condensed expression

scrimption
n. a very small amount or degree

perficient
adj. that accomplishes something; effectual

Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic without using his hands, 1984:

Bootstraps

The 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is often cited as one of the longest words in English — it’s been recognized both by Merriam-Webster and by the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED Supplement traced it to a 1936 puzzle book by Frank Scully called Bedside Manna, defining it as “a disease caused by ultra-microscopic particles of sandy volcanic dust.” But in fact it had appeared first in a Feb. 23, 1935, story in the New York Herald Tribune:

Puzzlers Open 103rd Session Here by Recognizing 45-Letter Word

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers’ League at the opening session of the organization’s 103d semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker.

The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of silica volcanic dust …

At the meeting NPL president Everett M. Smith had claimed the word was legitimate, but in fact he’d coined it himself. Distinguished by the newspaper, it found its way into Scully’s book and thence into the dictionaries, “surely one of the greatest ironies in the history of logology,” according to author Chris Cole. Today it’s recognized as long but phony — Oxford changed its definition to “an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.”

(Chris Cole, “The Biggest Hoax,” Word Ways 22:4 [November 1989], 205-206.)

Perfect Numbers

From Lee Sallows:

As the reader can check, the English number names less than “twenty” are composed using 16 different letters of the alphabet. We assign a distinct integral value to each of these as follows:

E   F   G   H   I   L   N   O   R   S   T   U   V   W   X   Z  
3   9   6   1  -4   0   5  -7  -6  -1   2   8  -3   7  11  10

The result is the following run of so called “perfect” numbers:

Z+E+R+O       =   10 + 3 – 6 – 7          =    0
O+N+E         =   –7 + 5 + 3              =    1
T+W+O         =    2 + 7 – 7              =    2
T+H+R+E+E     =    2 + 1 – 6 + 3 + 3      =    3
F+O+U+R       =    9 – 7 + 8 – 6          =    4
F+I+V+E       =    9 – 4 – 3 + 3          =    5
S+I+X         =   –1 – 4 + 11             =    6
S+E+V+E+N     =   –1 + 3 – 3 + 3 + 5      =    7
E+I+G+H+T     =    3 – 4 + 6 + 1 + 2      =    8
N+I+N+E       =    5 – 4 + 5 + 3          =    9
T+E+N         =    2 + 3 + 5              =   10
E+L+E+V+E+N   =    3 + 0 + 3 – 3 + 3 + 5  =   11
T+W+E+L+V+E   =    2 + 7 + 3 + 0 – 3 + 3  =   12

The above is due to a computer program in which nested Do-loops try out all possible values in systematically incremented steps. The above solution is one of two sets coming in second place to the minimal (lowest set of values) solution seen here:

 E   F   G   H   I   L   N   O   R   S   T   U   V   W   X   Z 
–2  –6   0  –7   7   9   2   1   4   3  10   5   6  –9  –4  –3

But why does the list above stop at twelve? Given that 3 + 10 = 13, and assuming that THREE, TEN and THIRTEEN are all perfect, we have T+H+I+R+T+E+E+N = T+H+R+E+E + T+E+N. But cancelling common letters on both sides of this equation yields E = I, which is to say E and I must share the same value, contrary to our requirement above that the letters be assigned distinct values. Thus, irrespective of letter values selected, if it includes THREE and TEN, no unbroken run of perfect numbers can exceed TWELVE. This might be decribed as a formal proof that THIRTEEN is unlucky.

But not all situations call for an unbroken series of perfect numbers. Sixteen distinct numbers occur in the following, eight positive, eight negative. This lends itself to display on a checkerboard:

sallows perfect numbers

Choose any number on the board. Call out the letters that spell its name, adding up their associated numbers when on white squares, subtracting when on black. Their sum is the number you selected.

(Thanks, Lee.)

Canting Arms

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hensbroek.svg

The village of Hensbroek in North Holland takes its name from the personal name Hein and the Dutch cognate of brook, i.e., “Henry’s brook.”

Magnificently, the municipal coat of arms interprets it instead as “hen’s breeches” — and depicts a chicken wearing trousers.

New Color

In a 1985 op-ed in the New York Times, writer Maggie Sullivan proposed some irregular verbs to match go, went, gone:

furlough, furlent, furlon: “All the soldiers were furlon except those the captain furlent last week.”
subdue, subdid, subdone: “Nothing else could have subdone him the way her violet eyes subdid him.”
frisbee, friswas, frisbeen: “Although he had never frisbeen before, after watching the tournament he friswas every day, trying to frisbee as the champions friswere.”
pay, pew, pain: “He had pain for not choosing a wife more carefully.”
conceal, console, consolen: “After the murder, Jake console the weapon.”
seesaw, sawsaw, seensaw: “While the children sawsaw, the old man thought of long ago when he had seensaw.”
fit, fat, fat: “The vest fat Joe, whereas the jacket would have fat a thinner man.”
ensnare, ensnore, ensnorn: “In the ’60s and ’70s, Sominex ads ensnore many who had never been ensnorn by ads before.”
displease, displose, displosen: “By the look on her face, I could tell she was displosen.”

Commemorate could emulate eat: “At the banquet to commemoreat Herbert Hoover, spirits were high, and by the end of the evening many other Republicans had been commemoreaten.”

(Maggie Sullivan, “You, Too, Can Strengthen English, and Write Good,” New York Times, May 4, 1985.)

In a Word

calophantic
adj. pretending or making a show of excellence

velleity
n. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it

fode
v. to lead on with delusive expectations

magnoperate
v. to magnify the greatness of

Roman diplomat Sidonius Apollinaris describes the hunting skill of Visigoth king Theodoric II:

If the chase is the order of the day, he joins it, but never carries his bow at his side, considering this derogatory to royal state. … He will ask you beforehand what you would like him to transfix; you choose, and he hits. If there is a miss … your vision will mostly be at fault, and not the archer’s skill.

(Quoted in Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, 2012.)