wittol
n. a man who knows of and tolerates his wife’s infidelity
Language
The Imbeciles
Here’s Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” as rendered by Jean Lescure’s “N+7” procedure, replacing each noun with the seventh following it in a dictionary:
The Imbeciles
I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o’er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.
Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle in the milky whey,
They stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of a day:
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.
The wealths beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key:
A poker could not be but gay,
In such a jocund constancy:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought:
For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
That is the block of turpitude;
And then my heat with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.
Immortal, no? It’s an example of an “oulipo” (“ouvroir de littérature potentielle” or, roughly, “workshop of potential literature”), one of a series of constrained writing techniques invented by French-speaking authors in the 1960s. Art, I suppose, is where you find it.
Memorable Headlines
In 1934, Variety ran a story about rural communities objecting to their portrayal in recent films. It was titled STIX NIX HICK PIX.
On May 31, 2000, the New York Daily News ran a story about Indiana Pacers fans denying courtside seats to New York fans. The headline was HICKS NIX KNICKS TIX.
And the jump head on page 5 read HICKS’ KNICKS TIX TRICK.
Walkie-Talkie
The French for walkie-talkie is talkie-walkie.
Number Names
The smallest number whose name is spelled with:
- 3 letters is 1 (one)
- 4 letters is 4 (four)
- 5 letters is 3 (three)
- 6 letters is 11 (eleven)
- 7 letters is 15 (fifteen)
- 8 letters is 13 (thirteen)
- 9 letters is 17 (seventeen)
- 10 letters is 24 (twenty-four)
- 15 letters is 103 (one hundred three)
- 20 letters is 124 (one hundred twenty-four)
- 25 letters is 1104 (one thousand one hundred four)
- 30 letters is 1117 (one thousand one hundred seventeen)
- 40 letters is 13,373 (thirteen thousand three hundred seventy-three)
- 50 letters is 113,373 (one hundred thirteen thousand three hundred seventy-three)
- 100 letters is 11,373,373,373 (eleven billion three hundred seventy-three million three hundred seventy-three thousand three hundred seventy-three)
Words With Early Pedigrees
Surprisingly old words:
- SPACESHIP (first print use: 1894)
- ACID RAIN (1858)
- HAIRDRESSER (1771)
- ANTACID (1753)
- HAS-BEEN (1606)
- EARTHLING (1593)
- MILKY WAY (ca. 1384, even earlier in Latin)
Amazingly, light beer (“leoht beor”) first shows up around the year 1000.
Forty
FORTY is the only number whose letters appear in alphabetical order.
In Spanish, the only such number is DOS.
(Thanks, Juan.)
The Great Gadsby
Gadsby is a 50,000-word novel that doesn’t use the letter E:
“But a man has to think of that, Allan. And you will, as you grow up. My two big sons just put off on that big troop train. I don’t know how long Bill and Julius will stay away. Your big cannon might go Boom! and hit Bill or Julius. Do you know Frank Morgan, Paul Johnson and John Smith? All right; that big cannon might hit that trio, too. Nobody can say who a cannon will hit, Allan. Now, you go right on through Grammar School, and grow up into a big strong man, and don’t think about war;” and Gadsby, standing and gazing far off to Branton Hills’ charming hill district, thought: “I think that will bust up a wild young ambition!”
The author, Ernest Vincent Wright, notes that he could mention no numbers between 6 and 30. And “When introducing young ladies into the story, this is a real barrier; for what young woman wants to have it known that she is over thirty?”
Spittoon by Any Other Name
James Joyce claimed that cuspidor is the most beautiful word in the English language.
Voynich Manuscript
Some writers seem to crave anonymity. None more so than the author of the Voynich manuscript, who invented a mysterious language and an unknown alphabet that has been defying scholars for 500 years.
To judge from the illustrations, the text deals with astronomy, biology, cosmology, herbs, and recipes. Handwriting experts say that the glyphs were written with speed and care, as if the author were facile with them. Statistical analysis seems to show that it’s a natural language, but the vocabulary is unusually small, and in some ways it seems to resemble Arabic more than European languages.
Because no one knows precisely what the 240-page book is, it’s hard to guess who wrote it. Suspects include a who’s who of Europe in the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon and John Dee among them. The cipher has resisted even the National Security Agency, leading some to think it’s a hoax, but even that is hard to prove conclusively.
There’s a great irony at the bottom of this. The mysterious author was one of the most successful cryptologists in history — so successful, in fact, that we may never know who he was.