The gravestone of John Renie, a 19th-century house painter, at St. Mary’s Priory Church in Monmouth, Wales, is a 285-letter acrostic puzzle — from the central H the sentence “Here lies John Renie” can be traced out (in king’s moves) in 45,760 different ways. Renie probably carved it himself; according to cleric Lionel Fanthorpe, he hoped it would occupy the devil while he escaped to heaven.
See “Remarkable Inscription” and A Puzzling Exit.
Actual names found by Joseph F. Wilkinson on a CD-ROM of U.S. residential telephone directories, 1996:
Barbara Seville
Gloria Monday
Rosetta Stone
Robin Banks
Frank Earnest
Clark Barr
Frank N. Stein
Georgia Peach
M.T. Head
Minnie Vann
Pearl Harper
Sunny Day
Phil Harmonic
Lance Boyle
King Fisher
Al Dente
Albert Fresco
James Dandy
Laurel Hardy
Nosmo King
A few become distinctive when the last name is listed first:
Cracker, Jack
Dollar, Bill
Wise, Guy
Sweet, Lorraine
North, Carolina
Oopsy, Daisy
“All these memorable names left me with the feeling that my own is quite forgettable,” Wilkinson wrote. “If only my parents had named me Sword, my phone book listing might have really given me an edge.”
(Joseph F. Wilkinson, “What’s in a Name? Just Ask King Fisher, Robin Banks and Minnie Vann,” Smithsonian 26:12 [March 1996], 136.)
perhorresce
v. to shudder at
Anthony Burgess based his 1974 novel Napoleon Symphony explicitly on the structure of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the Eroica:
There he lies,
Ensanguinated tyrant
O bloody, bloody tyrant
See
How the sin within
Doth incarnadine
His skin
From the shin to the chin.
Overall, Burgess said, he wanted to pursue “one mad idea”: “to give / Symphonic shape to verbal narrative” and to “impose on life … the abstract patterns of the symphonist.”
He dedicated the novel to Stanley Kubrick, hoping that it might form the basis of the director’s long-planned biography of the emperor, but Kubrick decided that “the [manuscript] is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon.” Undismayed, Burgess developed it instead into an experimental novel. The critics didn’t like it, but he said it was “elephantine fun” to write.
(From Theodore Ziolkowski, Music Into Fiction, 2017.)
A poem by Louis Phillips: “If the Modern Artist Ralph Goings Had Met the Poet E.E. Cummings”:
Goings?
Cummings?
Cummings,
Goings.
Goings,
Cummings.
Going,
Goings?
Yep.
Cummings,
Going?
Nope.
In the 17th century, French architect Thomas Gobert planned 12 churches whose forms spelled out the words LOVIS LE GRAND (where each letter is doubled mirrorwise, for symmetry):
In 1775 Johann David Steingruber designed a castle whose floor plan formed the initials of Prince Christian Carl Friedrich Alexander of Anspach:
And in 1774 Anton Glonner designed a Jesuit college based on the name of Christ (IHS, the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek):
The H contained the kitchen, the dining room, and the sacristy, and the S contained the schoolrooms.
(From Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich, The Architecture of Fantasy, 1962.)
Mike Keith found this amazing correspondence in 2004. The two 6×6 squares below contain 72 different entries from the periodic table of the elements:
The two squares are equal in three different ways:
Keith writes, “The next largest pair of triply-equal squares like this would be 7×7 in size, containing a total of 98 different elements, [and] it seems quite unlikely that 98 of them could be so arranged. If this is true then the 6×6 pair presented here is the largest possible (at least for now, until many more new chemical elements have been discovered and named).”
(Mike Keith, “A Magical Pair of 6×6 Chemical Squares,” Word Ways, February 2004.)
In August 1805, Lewis and Clark encountered a band of Shoshone Indians led by Chief Cameahwait. In order for Lewis to communicate with Cameahwait, the group had to speak four languages: Lewis spoke English to Private Francois Labiche, who spoke French to interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau, who spoke Hidatsa to his Shoshone wife Sacagawea, who spoke Shoshone to Chief Cameahwait. Cameahwait’s reply passed back up the chain in the opposite direction.
Amazingly, Cameahwait turned out to be Sacagawea’s brother. They had been separated for five years, ever since her abduction by Hidatsa in 1800. Overjoyed at the reunion, he gave the expedition much-needed guides and horses to help them cross the Rocky Mountains.
jawsmith
n. a talkative person
meropic
adj. able to speak
obmutescent
adj. speechless; remaining mute
Mr. Justice Norris, in the Calcutta High Court, recently delivered what is understood to be the shortest summing-up on record. It was as follows: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, the prisoner has nothing to say, and I have nothing to say. What have you got to say?’
— The Green Bag, October 1890
In 2015, University of East London psychologist Tim Lomas encountered the Finnish word sisu, which means something like extraordinary determination in the face of adversity. The word has no direct analog in English, but it describes a universal human trait — an English speaker who learns it can more easily recognize and appreciate sisu in herself and others, which enriches her life.
Lomas began collecting similarly specific words that describe positive feelings:
Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says that learning to make fine distinctions in identifying one’s feelings increases “emotion granularity,” which has real benefits — people with a rich emotional vocabulary recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol. Yale psychologist Marc Brackett, who has seen similar benefits among children, agrees that Lomas’ word list could help people to identify and appreciate their positive feelings. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives.”
Lomas’ list now numbers more than 400 words — you can browse them here.
(Thanks, Greg.)
