- Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu are roughly antipodal.
- WONDER is UNDERWAY in Pig Latin.
- By convention, current flows from positive to negative in a circuit; electrons, which are negatively charged, move in the opposite direction.
- The immaculate conception describes the birth of Mary, not Jesus.
- “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.” — Samuel Butler
Language
To Be Clear
Modern punctuation doesn’t always do the job, so writers have suggested various improvements. In the 1580s, English printer Henry Denham proposed a “percontation point,” ⸮, to be used at the end of a rhetorical question. In 1668, Anglican clergyman John Wilkins suggested using an inverted exclamation point, ¡, for the same purpose.
In the 1840s, Belgian newspaper publisher Marcellin Jobard introduced a small arrow whose orientation might indicate irony, irritation, indignation, or hesitation.
In 1899, French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested a point d’ironie to indicate that a sentence was ironic or sarcastic:
And in a 1966 essay, French writer Hervé Bazin proposed (left to right) the irony point, the doubt point, the conviction point, the acclamation point, the authority point, and the love point:
None of these has caught on, but the interrobang, ‽, introduced in 1962 by Martin Speckter to denote a question expressed in an exclamatory manner, is still included in many fonts.
More at Type Talk.
“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
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:
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
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.
Spelling Aid
These signs are posted on Cathedral Street in Woolloomooloo, New South Wales.
Oh
If you rearrange the letters in WHAT IS THE MEANING OR PURPOSE OF LIFE?, you get WINNIE-THE-POOH, SUFFER PIGLET’S AROMA.
(Discovered by John Henrick, Word Ways, May 1989.)