House Debate

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On seeing two women screaming at one another across an Edinburgh alley, Sydney Smith paused.

“Those two women will never agree,” he said. “They are arguing from different premises.”

Wisdom

Proverbs of the 11th century, from Egbert of Liège’s The Well-Laden Ship:

  • Not every cloud you see threatens rain.
  • A boy is consumed by envy, an old man by anger.
  • A reasonable sufficiency is more righteous than dishonorable riches.
  • One does well to distrust a stream, even one that is calm.
  • Sometimes an old dog growls the truth.
  • It is a hard cheese that the greedy man does not give to his dogs.
  • He who cannot conceal, ought not to become a thief.
  • Whose bread I eat, his songs I sing.
  • All the gold that a king has does not equal this rain.
  • No thief will be hanged, if he himself is the judge.
  • What earned this one praise gets that one a beating.
  • Smoky things appear by day, and fiery things by night.
  • The living husband is incensed by praise of the dead one.
  • A stupid person who is corrected, immediately hates his admonisher.
  • It is not the lowliest of virtues to have placed a limit on your wealth.
  • No mother-in-law is pleasing to her daughter-in-law unless she is dead.
  • A frog on a throne quickly gives up the honor.
  • When you trade one fish for another, one of them stinks.
  • Whoever hates his work, surely hated himself first.
  • To a man hanging, any delay seems too long.

And “One way or another, brothers, we will all pass from here.”

“Which?”

Submitted by Joseph Hall for Life magazine’s 1915 short story contest:

They were two women, one young, radiant, the other gently, beautifully old.

‘But, Auntie, it’s such fun.’

The older rose.

‘Wait.’

In a moment she had returned. Two faded yellow letters lay upon the young girl’s lap.

‘Read them.’

Wonderingly the girl obeyed. The first read:

Dearest:

I leave you to John. It is plain you care for him. I love you. Just now it seems that life without you is impossible. But I can no longer doubt. If you cared, there would be no doubt. John is my friend. I would rather see you his than any other’s, since you cannot be mine. God bless you.

Will.

The other:

Beloved:

I am leaving you to the better man. For me there can never be another love. But it is best — it is the right thing — and I am, yes, I am glad that it is Will you love instead of me. You cannot be anything but happy with him. With me — but that is a dream I must learn to forget.

As ever and ever,

John.

Visual Aids

https://books.google.com/books?id=Q05GAAAAYAAJ

Dispensationalist pastor Clarence Larkin illustrated his books with intricate charts interpreting prophecy and explaining God’s action in history.

“[T]he charts had to be thought out and developed under the direction and guidance of the Holy Spirit,” he wrote in Dispensational Truth (1920). “In this the Holy Spirit did not confuse the Author by suggesting all the charts at one time. When one was completed another was suggested. And upon more than one occasion when a problem arose the answer was given in the night or at awakening in the morning.”

Literary Limericks

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Did Ophelia ask Hamlet to bed?
Was Gertrude incestuously wed?
Is there anything certain?
By the fall of the curtain
Almost everyone’s certainly dead.

— A. Cinna

Once a raven on Pluto’s dark shore
Brought the singular news: “Nevermore.”
‘Twas of useless avail
To ask further detail,
His reply was the same as before.

— Anthony Euwer

There once was a fellow called Hyde,
Whose twin self he couldn’t abide;
But Jekyll, the Devil,
Dragged Hyde to his level,
“Inside job,” cried Hyde, as he died.

— E.J. Jackson

When Ireland was bloody and leaderless,
The tedious, garrulous Daedalus —
Having failed both as priest
And as Glorious Beast —
Sailed away to write books that were readerless.

— Gina Berkeley

Misc

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Image: Flickr
  • At the equinox, the sun rises due east at every latitude.
  • UPPER TYPEWRITER ROW is typed on the upper row of a typewriter.
  • 32785 = 3 + 2 × 7 + 85
  • In the Mbabaram Aboriginal language of north Queensland, dog means dog.
  • The London Times has published no obituary for Sherlock Holmes. Therefore he exists.

(Thanks, Sanford.)

“To My Pupil”

Lewis Carroll’s 1885 puzzle book A Tangled Tale bears an anonymous dedication:

Beloved Pupil! Tamed by thee,
Addish-, Subtrac-, Multiplica-tion,
Division, Fractions, Rule of Three,
Attest thy deft manipulation!
Then onward! Let the voice of Fame
From Age to Age repeat thy story,
Till thou has won thyself a name
Exceeding even Euclid's glory!

He was thinking of Edith Rix, a child-friend who went on to study mathematics at Cambridge. She might have divined without asking that the dedication was intended for her. How?

Click for Answer

Ellison Words

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison typed more than 1,700 works using a single finger of each hand. In 1999 Mike Keith set out to learn which words would be easiest for him to type. “Easy” means that successive letters are typed by alternate hands and that the hands travel as little as possible. (See the article for some other technicalities.)

Here are the easiest words of 4 to 13 letters; the score in parenthesis is the total linear distance traveled by the fingers, normalized by dividing by the length of the word (lower is better):

DODO, PAPA, TUTU (0.00)
DODOS, NINON (0.20)
BANANA (0.17)
AUSTERE (0.77)
TEREBENE (0.53)
ABATEMENT (1.12)
MAHARAJAS (0.88)
PROHIBITORY (1.15)
MONOTONICITY (1.19)
MONONUCLEOSIS (1.05)

Ellison could easily have used most of these in a story about an infectious disease outbreak in India. But I guess that might have looked lazy.

(Michael Keith, “Typewriter Words,” Word Ways 32:4 [November 1999], 270-277.)

“Oscar’s Morning Work”

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Oscar Wilde, among his various stories told here of which he was always the aesthetic hero, related that once while on a visit to an English country house he was much annoyed by the pronounced Philistinism of a certain fellow guest, who loudly stated that all artistic employment was a melancholy waste of time.

‘Well, Mr. Wilde,’ said Oscar’s bugbear one day at lunch, ‘and pray how have you been passing your morning?’ ‘Oh! I have been immensely busy,’ said Oscar with great gravity. ‘I have spent my whole time over the proof sheets of my book of poems.’ The Philistine with a growl inquired the result of that.

‘Well, it was very important,’ said Oscar. ‘I took out a comma.’ ‘Indeed,’ returned the enemy of literature, ‘is that all you did?’ Oscar, with a sweet smile, said, ‘By no means; on mature reflection I put back the comma.’ This was too much for the Philistine, who took the next train to London.

Syracuse [N.Y.] Standard, May 21, 1884

More Madan

Excerpts from the notebooks of English belletrist Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947):

[Eton] masters asleep during Essay in various abandoned attitudes. Hornby like a frozen mammoth in a cave; Stone drooping; Vaughan like a monarch taking his rest; Churchill like a fowl on a perch with a film over his eyes.

A.E. Housman’s epitaph: the only member of the middle classes who never called himself a gentleman.

“It is the cause”: theory that Othello closes and lays down a Bible.

Gladstone’s Virgil quotations, like plovers’ nests: impossible to see till you’ve been shown.

“Love gratified is love satisfied, and love satisfied is indifference begun.” — Richardson

“It matters not at all in what way I lay this poker on the floor. But if Bonaparte should say it must be placed in this direction, we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one.” — Nelson

“Conservative: a man with an inborn conviction that he is right, without being able to prove it.” — Revd. T. James, 1844

“Lord Normanby, in recklessly opening the Irish gaols, has exchanged the customary attributes of Mercy and Justice: he has made Mercy blind, and Justice weeping.” — Lord Wellesley