Words and Motion

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In a 1778 letter, English naturalist Gilbert White captured the characteristic movement of almost 50 birds:

Owls move in a buoyant manner, as if lighter than air … herons seem incumbered with too much sail for their light bodies … the green-finch … exhibits such languishing and faltering gestures as to appear like a wounded and dying bird … fernowls, or goat-suckers, glance in the dusk over the tops of trees like a meteor; starlings as it were swim along.

Biographer Richard Mabey writes, “What is striking is the way Gilbert often arranges his sentence structure to echo the physical style of a bird’s flight. So, ‘The white-throat uses odd jerks and gesticulations over the tops of hedges and bushes’; and ‘woodpeckers fly volatu undosu [in an undulating flight], opening and closing their wings at every stroke, and so are always rising or falling in curves.”

(From Mabey’s Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne, 2007.)

| Language · Literature

In a Word

http://elzo-meridianos.blogspot.com/2015/10/la-capsula-espacial-abandonada-en-mitad.html
Image: Meridianos

peisant
adj. having great weight

dissight
n. an unsightly object, an eyesore

bonification
n. the action of making something good or better

subrident
adj. accompanied by a smile

In 1959, a cement mixer rolled off a road in northeastern Oklahoma. The owners retrieved the truck, but the mixer held tons of concrete and was too heavy to move. Plans to bury it on the spot were eventually abandoned, and the disused mixer lay for decades beside Winganon Road. In 2008 Heather Thomas and her husband, Barry, decided to celebrate their fifth anniversary by finally attending to the matter — they disguised in as a space capsule.

(Thanks, Colin.)

| Language · Oddities

In a Word

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thalassic
adj. of or relating to seas and oceans

dégringolade
n. a quick deterioration or breakdown, as of a situation or circumstance

supersalient
adj. leaping upon

sperate
adj. hoped for; not hopeless

Shipwreck With a Surviving Dog, by the Danish artist Carl Bille (1815–1898).

| Art · Language

Misc

  • “Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.” — Swedish proverb
  • Uranus was discovered before Antarctica.
  • PROTECTORATE is a palindrome in Morse code.
  • PUBLIC RELATIONS is an anagram of CRAP BUILT ON LIES.
  • If you copy this sentence, be sure to omit “”.

(The fourth is due to Mick Tully, the fifth to David Armstrong.)

| Language · Oddities · Quotations · Trivia

Last Words

In 1899, six years before her death at age 70, Aboriginal Tasmanian Fanny Cochrane Smith made five wax cylinder recordings of traditional Aboriginal songs and language.

They are the only recorded example of Tasmanian Aboriginal songs and the only recorded example of any Tasmanian Aboriginal language.

Emily Keene, who was present at the recording, said that when the cylinder was played back for her, Smith cried, “My poor race. What have I done.”

“We could not pacify her for a long time,” Keene said. “She thought the voice she had heard was that of her mother.”

| History · Language

Obstacle Course

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In Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos, a Christmas party game from 1824, players had to take turns reading tongue-twisting passages as quickly as possible from a prepared list. Each passage represents a letter of the alphabet, and each builds on its forerunners. The worst is this:

TOBY PHILPOT sat tippling with UMPO, VUMPO, and WILLY WIDEMOUTH of Wolverhampton, when X and Y, two officers, brought in the culprit, while Saccharum Sweet Tooth said nothing, while Ramo Samee really swollowed a sword, while Sly Kia cried Quack! quack! quack! And turned into a duck, to escape from Poniatowsky, who said, To jail with the Juggler and Jade, as Mother Bunch on her broomstick cried, here’s a to-do! as Nicholas Hotch-potch said, Never were such times, as Muley Hassan, Mufti of Moldavia, put on his Barnacles, to see little Tweedle gobble them up, when Kia Khan Kreuse transmogrofied them into Pippins, because Snip’s wife cried, Illikipilliky! lass a-day! ’tis too bad to titter at a body, when Hamet el Mammet, the bottlenosed Barber of Balasora, laughed ha! ha! ha! on beholding the elephant spout mud over the ‘Prentice, who pricked his trunk with a needle, as Dicky Snip, the tailor, read the proclamation of Chrononhotonthologos, offering a thousand sequins for taking Bombardinian, Bashaw of three tails, who killed Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos.

A player who couldn’t pronounce a passage perfectly had to pay a penalty for each mistake. Here’s the whole list.

| Language