Punctuation

Greed

My life is full, indeed, of gloom.
I’ve naught, you see; just this small room.
I need more wealth — that’s misery.
What joys in great renown! What glee!
The mace and throne I long to own.
No crown too grand for me alone.

Contentment

My life is full, indeed!
Of gloom I’ve naught, you see.
Just this small room I need.
More wealth? That’s misery.
What joy’s in great renown?
What glee, the mace and throne?
I long to own no crown.
Too grand for me alone.

— Mary Youngquist

(David L. Silverman, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 5:3 [August 1972], 168-181.)

| Language · Poems

In a Word

quadragenarian
n. one in her forties

repentine
adj. sudden

monomachy
n. a duel; single combat

labefaction
n. overthrow, downfall

The longest-lived spider on record is Number 16, a wild female trapdoor spider that lived on the North Bungulla Reserve near Tammin, Western Australia. She’d reached age 43 when ecologist Leanda Mason discovered that something, probably a parasitic wasp, had pierced the silk door of her burrow, which was now empty.

“She was cut down in her prime,” Mason told the Washington Post. “It took a while to sink in, to be honest.”

| Language · Science & Math

More Fortuitous Numbers

Two years ago I wrote about the number 84,672, which has a surprising property: When its name is written out in (American) English (EIGHTY FOUR THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED SEVENTY TWO) and the letter counts of those words are multiplied together (6 × 4 × 8 × 3 × 7 × 7 × 3), they yield the original number (84,672).

Such numbers are called fortuitous, and, not surprisingly, very few of them are known. When I wrote about them in 2019, the whole list ran 4, 24, 84672, 1852200, 829785600, 20910597120, 92215733299200. Now Jonathan Pappas has discovered two more:

1,239,789,303,244,800,000

ONE QUINTILLION TWO HUNDRED THIRTY NINE QUADRILLION SEVEN HUNDRED EIGHTY NINE TRILLION THREE HUNDRED THREE BILLION TWO HUNDRED FORTY FOUR MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND

3 × 11 × 3 × 7 × 6 × 4 × 11 × 5 × 7 × 6 × 4 × 8 × 5 × 7 × 5 × 7 × 3 × 7 × 5 × 4 × 7 × 5 × 7 × 8 = 1,239,789,303,244,800,000

887,165,996,513,213,819,259,682,435,576,627,200,000,000

EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN DUODECILLION ONE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE UNDECILLION NINE HUNDRED NINETY SIX DECILLION FIVE HUNDRED THIRTEEN NONILLION TWO HUNDRED THIRTEEN OCTILLION EIGHT HUNDRED NINETEEN SEPTILLION TWO HUNDRED FIFTY NINE SEXTILLION SIX HUNDRED EIGHTY TWO QUINTILLION FOUR HUNDRED THIRTY FIVE QUADRILLION FIVE HUNDRED SEVENTY SIX TRILLION SIX HUNDRED TWENTY SEVEN BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION

5 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 12 × 3 × 7 × 5 × 4 × 11 × 4 × 7 × 6 × 3 × 9 × 4 × 7 × 8 × 9 × 3 × 7 × 8 × 9 × 5 × 7 × 8 × 10 × 3 × 7 × 5 × 4 × 10 × 3 × 7 × 6 × 3 × 11 × 4 × 7 × 6 × 4 × 11 4 × 7 × 7 × 3 × 8 × 3 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 7 × 3 × 7 × 7 = 887,165,996,513,213,819,259,682,435,576,627,200,000,000

A 10th solution, if one exists, will be greater than 10138.

Details are here. Jonathan has also discovered some cyclic solutions (ONE HUNDRED SIXTY EIGHT -> FIVE HUNDRED TWENTY FIVE -> SIX HUNDRED SEVENTY TWO -> FOUR HUNDRED FORTY ONE -> FOUR HUNDRED TWENTY -> ONE HUNDRED SIXTY EIGHT) and the remarkable 195954154450774917120 -> 195954154450774917120000 -> 1959541544507749171200000.

(Thanks, Jonathan.)

| Language · Science & Math

Back and Forth

In the autumn of 1947, Oxford mathematician John Henry Whitehead became fascinated with palindromes. He came up with STEP ON NO PETS but felt this could be surpassed. He put the problem to research student Peter Hilton, who suggested SEX AT NOON TAXES. Whitehead liked this but still felt that a longer sensible palindrome must be possible.

So Hilton spent an entire night working on the problem, writing nothing down, just lying in the dark. By morning he had:

DOC, NOTE, I DISSENT. A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD.

“Henry was delighted, and spread the word about my palindrome far and wide,” Hilton wrote later. Among those who heard about it were their former colleagues at Bletchley Park, where Whitehead and Hilton had helped to decrypt German ciphers during the war, and from there Hilton’s composition found its way into The Codebreakers, F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp’s account of that effort.

Robert Harris quoted the palindrome in his review of that book, “to indicate what sort of people the codebreakers were,” Hilton wrote. “But he also quoted the remark, attributed to Churchill, on the priority to be given to recruiting suitable people for this work: ‘When I told them to leave no stone unturned, I did not intend to be taken so literally.'”

(“Miscellanea,” College Mathematics Journal 30:5 [November 1999], 422-424.)

| Language

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_hemispheres.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons
  • POSSESSIONLESSNESSES has nine Ss.
  • Trains are older than bicycles.
  • 87 percent of the human population lives in the Northern Hemisphere.
  • This sentence no verb.
  • “God pity a one-dream man.” — Robert H. Goddard

Roald Dahl wrote the film adaptations for two of Ian Fleming’s novels, You Only Live Twice and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.

(Thanks, Ben and Fred.)

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Trivia

In a Word

amphiscians
n. inhabitants of the tropics

angustation
n. the condition of being narrowed, constricted, limited, or confined

caducity
n. frailty, transitoriness

avolation
n. the act of flying away

This is the song of the last male Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, recorded in the Alaka’i Wilderness Preserve on Kauaʻi in 1987. Rats, pigs, hurricanes, and disease-carrying mosquitoes had reduced the species to a single pair by 1981, and the female was not found after Hurricane Iwa in 1982. The male was last seen in 1985. This appears to be his song, overheard two years later, the last trace of a vanishing species.

| Death · Language · Science & Math

One World

In 1922, Baltic German teacher and linguist Edgar de Wahl offered a new language to facilitate communication between people from different nations. He called it Occidental, and designed it so that many of its words will be recognizable by those who already know a Romance language:

Li material civilisation, li scientie, e mem li arte unifica se plu e plu. Li cultivat europano senti se quasi in hem in omni landes queles have europan civilisation, it es, plu e plu, in li tot munde. Hodie presc omni states guerrea per li sam armes. Sin cessa li medies de intercomunication ameliora se, e in consequentie de to li terra sembla diminuer se. Un Parisano es nu plu proxim a un angleso o a un germano quam il esset ante cent annus a un paisano frances.

“Material civilization, science, and even art unify themselves more and more. The educated European feels himself almost at home in all lands that have European civilization, that is, more and more, in the entire world. Today almost all states war with the same armaments. Without pause the modes of intercommunication improve, and in consequence from that the world seems to decrease. A Parisian is now closer to an Englishman or a German than he was a hundred years before to a French peasant.”

It gained a small community of speakers in the 1920s and 1930s and had largely died out by the 1980s — but in recent years it’s seen a resurgence on the Internet as Interlingue.

| Language

Sesquipedalian

In the August 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published a cryptogram composed by a Doctor Frailey of Washington and offered a year’s subscription to any reader who could solve it. In October he published the solution, which he’d managed to find:

In one of those peripatetic circumrotations I obviated a rustic whom I subjected to catechetical interrogation respecting the nosocomical characteristics of the edifice to which I was approximate. With a volubility uncongealed by the frigorific powers of villatic bashfulness, he ejaculated a voluminous replication from the universal tenor of whose contents I deduce the subsequent amalgamation of heterogeneous facts. Without dubiety incipient pretension is apt to terminate in final vulgarity, as parturient mountains have been fabulated to produce muscupular abortions. The institution the subject of my remarks, has not been without cause the theme of the ephemeral columns of quotidian journalism, and enthusiastic encomiations in conversational intercourse.

He was upbraided in November by a Richard Bolton of Pontotoc, Mississippi, who’d sent in a solution but received no credit. Poe redressed the error and added, “Your solution astonished me. You will accuse me of vanity in so saying — but truth is truth. I make no question that it even astonished yourself — and well it might – for from at least 100,000 readers — a great number of whom, to my certain knowledge, busied themselves in the investigation — you and I are the only ones who have succeeded.”

| Language · Science & Math