Zoo Cliques

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wilderbeest.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

More nouns of assemblage:

  • a business of ferrets
  • a cartload of chimpanzees
  • a coalition of cheetahs
  • a congress of baboons
  • a gang of elk
  • a huddle of penguins
  • a kaleidoscope of butterflies
  • a labour of moles
  • a prickle of porcupines
  • a quarrel of sparrows
  • a romp of otters
  • a tiding of magpies
  • a tower of giraffes
  • a ubiquity of sparrows
  • a whiteness of swans
  • a zeal of zebras

My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?

What’s in a Name?

In the seventeenth century, André Pujom, finding that his name spelled Pendu à Riom, fulfilled his destiny by cutting somebody’s throat in Auvergne, and was actually hung at Riom, the seat of justice in that province.

— William Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882

Don’t Call Us

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Revilo_p_oliver.jpg

American philologist Revilo P. Oliver had a palindromic name — it reads the same backward and forward. In his family, he said, the name “has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.”

And it cost him — at least one journal rejected his articles as fraudulent.

A Universal Solution

In 1965, Dmitri Borgmann noted that this expression:

11 + 2 – 1 = 12

… is valid also when interpreted as a set of characters:

11 “+ 2” = 112; 112 “- 1” = 12

… as a set of Roman numerals:

XI + II = XIII; XIII – I = XII

… and even as a set of letters:

ELEVEN + TWO = ELEVENTWO
ELEVENTWO – ONE = LEVETW (= TWELVE)