Remarked by Robert Southey in 1850:
“If you wait half an hour on the Pont Neuf, it was said, you were sure to see an Abbé, a Benedictin, a Genovesin, a Capuchin, a Knight of St. Louis, a French Guardsman, a woman of the town, and a white horse cross during that time. This has been often tried and verified.”
Sir,
The hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, sung to the right tune and in a not-too-brisk tempo, makes a very good egg timer. If you put the egg into boiling water and sing all five verses and chorus, the egg will be just right when you come to Amen.
— Mrs. G.H. Moore, letter to the Daily Telegraph, 1983
10/22/2024 UPDATE: Interesting addendum from reader Mark Thompson: The capital cities Asunción, Canberra, and Kuwait City are nearly equidistant on great-circle routes:
Kuwait City to Canberra: 12,768 km
Canberra to Asunción: 12,712 km
Asunción to Kuwait City: 12,766 km
“Their mutual distances apart (along the earth’s surface) happen to be very close to one Earth-diameter [12,742 km]: so, sadly, they don’t all lie on a single great circle (since pi is not 3).” (Thanks, Mark.)
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.
07/17/2024 UPDATE: Several readers point out, correctly, that carbon is hardly the only elemental “chemical word” — indeed, some elements can be spelled in multiple ways. I’ve assembled this list from multiple contributions:
ArSeNiC ArSeNIC
AsTaTiNe
BiSmUTh BISmUTh
CArBON CaRbON
CoPPEr COPPEr
IrON
KrYPtON
NeON
OGaNeSSON OGaNEsSON
PHoSPHoRuS PHOSPHoRuS PHOsPHoRuS PHoSPHORus PHOSPHORuS PHOsPHORuS
SiLiCoN SiLiCON SILiCON SILiCoN
SiLvEr SILvEr
TeNNeSSINe TeNNEsSiNe TeNNEsSINe
TiN
XeNON XeNoN
TiN is even a valid compound, titanium nitride.
Of these Borgmann had found arsenic, carbon, iron, neon, phosphorus, silicon, and xenon when he wrote in 1974, “surely the most unusual is CARBON which can be factored into elements not including itself.” But that property wasn’t unique even within his limited list, as can be seen above.
Many thanks to readers Gareth McCaughan, Catalin Voinescu, and Eric Harshbarger for writing in about this.
Seinfeld began and ended with the same line.
The color fuchsia is named after the flower of that name, which was named after 16th-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs. And Fuchs is German for fox. So the color is named after a plant named after a man named after an animal.
The color orange is named after the fruit, rather than the other way around.
Canaries are named after the Canary Islands, rather than the other way around.
04/20/2024 UPDATE: The Canary Islands in turn derive their name from the Latin name Canariae Insulae, “islands of the dogs.” Pliny the Elder records that the islands contained “vast multitudes of dogs of very large size.” So animal -> islands -> bird. (Thanks, Bob, Randy, Derek, and Sam.)
And chartreuse is named after the French liqueur of that color, which is named after the Grand Chartreuse order of monks that created it in the eponymous Chartreuse Mountains. Mountains -> monastery -> beverage -> color. (Thanks, John.)
Star Trek costume designer William Ware Theiss offered the Theiss Theory of Titillation: “The degree to which a costume is considered sexy is directly proportional to how accident-prone it appears to be.”
(Thanks, Michael.)
