- To burn up is to burn down.
- Litotes is an anagram of T.S. Eliot.
- 1012658227848 × 8 = 8101265822784
- Three U.S. presidents died on July 4.
- “Grasp the subject, the words will follow.” — Cato the Elder
Language
In a Word
pluvial
adj. relating to rainfall
A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.
— Proust, Swann’s Way
Ironically Apt
In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg:
“I fly around on my awesome wings, patrolling supermarket showcases and kitchen refrigerators. I can talk to vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish and can check on their health! I was born in a Fukushima refrigerator! I love eating and I’m full of curiosity. I think of myself as kind, with a strong sense of justice, but my friends say I’m a bit of a klutz. But I’m always working hard to make myself shine!”
Unfortunately the company named the character “Fukuppy,” a combination of Fukushima and the English word happy.
After the name began to make news in English-speaking countries, Fukushima issued an apology and withdrew it.
Catastrophe
In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline:
ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER
Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out as in telegrams: ‘I will tell you for your penny about the Italian Assassin and the well-known Bomb Plot Disaster’; but the assassin, as far as I remember, was actually not an Italian; Italian refers to the whole aggregate, and its noun, if any, is disaster. Perhaps, by being so far separated from its noun, it gives the impression that the other words, too, are somehow connected with Italy; that bombs, plots, and disasters belong both to government and rebel in those parts; perhaps Italian Assassin is not wholly separate in one’s mind from the injured Mussolini.
In fact it’s not clear what the intended meaning had been. Empson says that the main rhythm conveys the sense “This is a particularly exciting sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy.” In The Wordsworth Book of Usage & Abusage (1995), Eric Partridge suggests that the writer may have meant ITALIAN DISASTER ASSASSIN’S BOMB-PLOT, “There has been in Italy a disaster caused by a bomb in an assassin’s plot.” But he agrees that “even after an exasperating amount of cogitation by the reader,” the meaning is unclear.
Tense Trouble
Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York.
Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney.
Would you say ‘There will be an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’
Or would you say ‘There was an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’
That’s from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s It’s About Time, from 1935. For the record, the Associated Press would dateline the story SYDNEY and refer to clock times in that location.
To the Point
In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”:
Madam,
We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on Tuesday next, the 14th inst., before 12 noon, which we trust will be convenient, after which our quotation will at once issue.
He reduces this to:
Madam,
We have your letter of May 9th requesting an estimate for the removal of your furniture and effects to Burbleton, and a man will call to see them next Tuesday forenoon if convenient, after which we will send the estimate without delay.
This shortens the letter from 66 words to 42. Then he cuts it again, to 35 words, or 157 letters against the original 294, a savings of nearly 50 percent:
Madam,
Thank you for your letter of May 9th. A man will call next Tuesday, forenoon, to see your furniture and effects, after which, without delay, we will send our estimate for their removal to Burbleton.
In a large firm, he estimates, cutting “verbose and indolent, obscure, inelegant, and time-devouring monkey-talk” could save a week’s work for two typists.
Elsewhere he considers a memo that reads “Hot-Water Bottles: With reference to the above matter I should like an opportunity of discussing same with you.” The improvement he suggests is “Could we, please, have a talk about Hot-Water Bottles?”
Pithy
Mark Antony’s funeral oration rendered in Scrabble tiles, by Pete Stickland:
COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH!
The tiles can also spell:
QUEASY RADIOMAN WEPT: GOT TO EYE FEROCIOUS BLAZE OF VIVID AERIAL EXPLOSION, CREMATING WILTED HINDENBURG AT LAKEHURST, N.J.
Roll Call
Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s:
- A. Noble Ladd
- Beverage Porter
- Bunker Hill
- Charming Fox
- Erie Lake
- France Paris
- Gunga Dean
- Harness Upp
- Harry Baer
- Ima Goose
- Jack Frost
- Johnny Steele Casebeer
- Liberty Bond
- Pansy Leafe
- Pearl Button
- Rose Bush
- Safety Reuel First
- Winter Frost
Ima Foster and Ura Foster, possibly twin sisters, both received master’s degrees in education at the University of Oklahoma in 1943. “It has been suggested to me that most of the bearers of jocular names come of families in which infant baptism is not practiced, inasmuch as (it is to be hoped) few clergymen would consent to make a travesty of the sacrament of baptism by bestowing such names in christening.”
(Thomas Pyles, “Onomastic Individualism in Oklahoma,” American Speech 22:4 [December 1947], 257-264.)
08/15/2024 UPDATE: It appears Safety First became a cardiologist. “My dad gave me this troublesome title. We already had a junior in the family, so dad named me after the popular motto that had just been created.” (Thanks, Charlotte.)
Misc
- Vatican City has 2.27 popes per square kilometer.
- Skylab was fined for littering.
- Five-syllable rhyming words in English: vocabulary, constabulary
- 8767122 + 3287682 = 876712328768
- “We die only once, and for such a long time!” — Molière
Above is the only known film footage of Mark Twain, shot at Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. The women are thought to be his daughters Clara and Jean.
In a Word
rarissima
n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or prints
In The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”:
- “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.”
- “A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.”
- “A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy.”
- “A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”
- “A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases.”
These groups seem to have been proposed by French librarian Jean Joseph Rive. Bibliographer Gabriel Peignot added four more:
- bibliolyte, a destroyer of books
- bibliologue, one who discourses about books
- bibliotacte, a classifier of books
- bibliopée, “‘l’art d’écrire ou de composer des livres,’ or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author.”