micropsychy
n. faint-heartedness
abulia
n. an inability to act decisively
quakebuttock
n. a coward
Language
In a Word
gynophagite
n. an eater of women
androphagous
adj. eating men
brephophagist
n. one who eats babies
GRKTRGDY
Here’s a special kind of genius: In 1992 Daniel Nussbaum rewrote Oedipus Rex using vanity license plates registered with the California Department of Motor Vehicles:
ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING. LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.
OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LTL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD? NOCALLZ NEVER. HAVENOT ACLUE. INMYMND IWNDER WHOAMI? IMUST FINDEM.
JO MYWIFE GOES, “OED DON’T USEE? WERHAPPI NOW LETITB.” IGO, “NOWAY. IAMBOSS. DONTU TELLME MYLIFE. INEED MYMOM. II WILLL FINDHER. FIND BOTHOF THEM.”
SOI START SEEKING DATRUTH ABOUT WHO IAM. ITGOEZ ULTRAAA SLOWE. THE SPHYNXS RIDDLE WAS ACINCH BUT NOTTHIZ.
SUDNLEE WEHEAR SHOCKING NEWS. WHEN IWASA TINY1 THISGR8 4SEER SED IWOOD OFF MY ROYAL OLDMAN THEN MARREE MYMAMA. SICKO RUBBISH, NESTPAS? WHOWHO COUDBE SOGONE? STIL MOMNDAD SENT MEEEEE AWAY. MEE ABABI AWAAAY.
NOWWWWW GETTHIZ. MANY MOONS GOBY. IMEET THISGUY ONATRIP. WEDOO RUMBLE. WHOKNEW? ILEFTMY POP ONE DEDMAN.
UGET DAFOTO. MAJOR TSURIS. JOJO MYHONEE, MYSQEEZ, MYLAMBY, MIAMOR, MYCUTEE, JOJOY IZZ MYMOMMY.
YEGODS WHYMEE? YMEYYME? LIFSUX. IAMBAD, IAMBADD, IMSOBAD. STOPNOW THISS HEDAKE. FLESH DUZ STINK. ITZ 2MUCH PAYNE 4ONE2C. TAKEGOD MYEYES! AIEEEEE!
Output
The programming language Chef, devised by David Morgan-Mar, is designed to make programs look like cooking recipes. Variables are represented by “ingredients,” input comes from the “refrigerator,” output is sent to “baking dishes,” and so on. The language’s design principles state that “program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious,” but many of them fall short of that goal — one program for soufflé correctly prints the words “Hello world!”, but the recipe requires 32 zucchinis, 101 eggs, and 111 cups of oil to be combined in a bowl and served to a single person. Mike Worth set out to write a working program that could also be read as an actual recipe. Here’s what he came up with:
Hello World Cake with Chocolate sauce. This prints hello world, while being tastier than Hello World Souffle. The main chef makes a " world!" cake, which he puts in the baking dish. When he gets the sous chef to make the "Hello" chocolate sauce, it gets put into the baking dish and then the whole thing is printed when he refrigerates the sauce. When actually cooking, I'm interpreting the chocolate sauce baking dish to be separate from the cake one and Liquify to mean either melt or blend depending on context. Ingredients. 33 g chocolate chips 100 g butter 54 ml double cream 2 pinches baking powder 114 g sugar 111 ml beaten eggs 119 g flour 32 g cocoa powder 0 g cake mixture Cooking time: 25 minutes. Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Method. Put chocolate chips into the mixing bowl. Put butter into the mixing bowl. Put sugar into the mixing bowl. Put beaten eggs into the mixing bowl. Put flour into the mixing bowl. Put baking powder into the mixing bowl. Put cocoa powder into the mixing bowl. Stir the mixing bowl for 1 minute. Combine double cream into the mixing bowl. Stir the mixing bowl for 4 minutes. Liquify the contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish. bake the cake mixture. Wait until baked. Serve with chocolate sauce. chocolate sauce. Ingredients. 111 g sugar 108 ml hot water 108 ml heated double cream 101 g dark chocolate 72 g milk chocolate Method. Clean the mixing bowl. Put sugar into the mixing bowl. Put hot water into the mixing bowl. Put heated double cream into the mixing bowl. dissolve the sugar. agitate the sugar until dissolved. Liquify the dark chocolate. Put dark chocolate into the mixing bowl. Liquify the milk chocolate. Put milk chocolate into the mixing bowl. Liquify contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish. Refrigerate for 1 hour.
Worth confirmed that this correctly prints the words “Hello world!”, and then he used the same instructions to bake a real cake. “It was surprisingly well received,” he writes. “The cake was slightly dry (although nowhere near as dry as cheap supermarket cakes), but this was complimented well by the sauce. My brother even asked me for the recipe!”
While we’re at it: Fibonacci Numbers With Caramel Sauce.
In a Word
rosarian
n. a rose fancier; one interested or engaged in the cultivation of roses
The rose cultivar “Whitfield” is named for English comedy actress June Whitfield.
She said, “There is a rose named after me. The catalogue describes it as ‘superb for bedding, best up against a wall.'”
In a Word
mumpsimus
n. a person who obstinately adheres to old ways, particularly in language; an ignorant and bigoted opponent of reform (also a custom so adhered to)
(Thanks, Cindy.)
Diner Lingo
- “Adam and Eve on a raft and wreck ’em”: two scrambled eggs on toast
- “Burn one, take it through the garden, and pin a rose on it”: hamburger with lettuce, tomato, and onion
- “Burn the British and draw one in the dark”: English muffin, toasted, with black coffee
- “Adam’s ale, hold the hail”: water, no ice
- “Give it shoes”: an order to go
- “Honeymoon salad”: “lettuce alone”
- “Life preservers”: doughnuts
- “Noah’s boy on bread”: ham sandwich
- “Put out the lights and cry”: liver and onions
- “Zeppelins in a fog”: sausages and mashed potatoes
In 1838 James Fenimore Cooper wrote, “The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.”
World View
In Other Inquisitions, Borges writes of a strange taxonomy in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia:
On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g), stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
This is fanciful, but it has the ring of truth — different cultures can classify the world in surprisingly different ways. In traditional Dyirbal, an aboriginal language of Australia, each noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words that classify all objects in the universe:
- bayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc.
- balan: women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc.
- balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake
- bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yamsticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises and language, etc.
“The fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and anthropologists,” writes UC-Berkeley linguist George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). “More often than not, the linguist or anthropologist just throws up his hands and resorts to giving a list — a list that one would not be surprised to find in the writings of Borges.”
Beneath the Surface
In Syntactic Structures (1957), to illustrate the difference between a meaningful sentence and a grammatical one, Noam Chomsky offered the expression Colorless green ideas sleep furiously as an example of a grammatical sentence that’s nonsense.
Naturally, some readers took this as a challenge — within months, students at Stanford had set up a competition to show that the expression could be understood as a meaningful sentence. Here’s one of the prizewinning entries:
It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
More entries are here. From David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, 2011.
In a Word
febrifacient
adj. producing fever
The 1895 meeting of the Association of American Physicians saw a sobering report: Abraham Jacobi presented the case of a young man whose temperature had reached 149 degrees.
Nonsense, objected William Henry Welch. Such an observation was impossible. He recalled a similar report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (March 31, 1891) in which a Dr. Galbraith of Omaha had found a temperature of 171 degrees in a young woman.
“I do not undertake to explain in what way deception was practised, but there is no doubt in my mind that there was deception,” he said. “Such temperatures as those recorded in Dr. Galbraith’s and Dr. Jacobi’s cases are far above the temperature of heat rigor of mammalian muscle, and are destructive of the life of animal cells.”
Jacobi defended himself: Perhaps medicine simply hadn’t developed a theory to account for such things. But another physician told Welch that Galbraith’s case at least had a perfectly satisfactory explanation — another doctor had caught her in “the old-fashioned trick of heating the thermometer by a hot bottle in the bed.”