vernalagnia
adj. heightened sexual desire in the springtime
Language
Lo!
In 1610, thinking he had discovered two moons orbiting Saturn, Galileo composed a message:
ALTISSIMUM PLANETAM TERGEMINUM OBSERVAVI (“I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form”)
… and sent it to Kepler as an anagram:
SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS
Remarkably, Kepler managed to “solve” this as a message about Mars, not Saturn:
SALVE UMBISTENEUM GEMINATUM MARTIA PROLES (“Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars”)
The German astronomer had predicted that the Red Planet had two moons, and imagined that Galileo was confirming his belief.
There’s a message in this, somewhere.
So There
The autobiography of the American eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748-1806) contains 8,847 words and no punctuation:
IME the first Lord in the younited States of Americary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt A Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare then goue on all is Easey Now …
When readers complained, he added a page of punctuation marks to the second edition, inviting them to “peper and solt it as thay plese.”
Pride of Place
Of all the odd numbers, which would appear first in a dictionary?
EIGHT BILLION EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHT MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHT THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHTY-FIVE (8,808,808,885).
(Thanks, Michael.)
Money Talks
When, at the General Peace of 1814, Prussia absorbed a portion of Saxony, the king issued a new coinage of rix dollars, with their German name, EIN REICHSTAHLER, impressed on them. The Saxons, by dividing the word, EIN REICH STAHL ER, made a sentence of which the meaning is, ‘He stole a kingdom!’
— William T. Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
In a Word
zenzizenzizenzic
n. a number raised to the eighth power
Chronograms
A medal struck of the 17th-century Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus included this motto:
ChrIstVs DuX ergo trIVMphVs
Rearrange the capital letters and you get MDCXVVVII, or 1627, the year in which the medal was stamped.
That’s a chronogram, and a pretty tame one, as these things go. In 1634 the Society of Jesuits at Brussels composed a remarkable congratulation to Ferdinand on his arrival in the Netherlands as governor; it contains 100 hexameters, every one of which is a chronogram adding to 1634:
AngeLe CoeLIVagI MIChaeL, LVX VnICa CaetVs.
Pro nVtV sVCCInCta tVo CVI CVnCta MInIstrant.
SIDera qVIqVe poLo gaVDentIa sIDera VoLVVnt. …
“Genius,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
In a Word
aidle
v. “to earn one’s bread indifferently well”
(Charles Mackay, Lost Beauties of the English Language, 1874)
The Bach Motif
Bach’s name forms a musical motif. The German note B is equivalent to the English B-flat, and H indicates B natural. So if you revolve this cross counterclockwise, the note at the center takes successively the German values B (treble clef), A (tenor clef), C (alto clef), and H (treble clef).
Bach himself used the four-note motif as a subject in The Art of Fugue, and it’s appeared since in works by Schumann, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Poulenc, and Webern.
“Chinese Tea Song”
Punch has favored the world with the following song, sung before her Britannic Majesty by a Chinese lady. It looks rather difficult at first; but if the reader studies it attentively, he will see how easy it is to read Chinese:–
Ohc ometo th ete asho pwit hme,
Andb uya po undo f thebe st,
‘Twillpr oveam ostex cellentt ea,
Itsq ua lit yal lwi lla tte st.‘Tiso nlyf oursh illi ngs apo und,
Soc omet othet eama rtan dtry,
Nob etterc anel sewh erebefou nd,
Ort hata nyoth er needb uy.
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890