Shouldn’t ENCOURAGE rhyme with ENTOURAGE?
Able Was I
One French Republican, by writing and analyzing, has produced the following:–
Which, being arranged in the form of a sentence, gives, ‘Napoleon on o leon leon eon apoleon poleon‘–which is the Greek for ‘Napoleon, being the lion of the people, was marching on, destroying the cities!‘
— Appleton Morgan, Macaronic Poetry, 1872
Unquote
“At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.” — Hector Berlioz
Steller’s Sea Ape
On Aug. 10, 1741, explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller reported spotting “a very unusual and new animal” in the waters off southern Alaska. It was about 5 feet long, he said, with the head of a dog and the tail of a shark, and was covered with gray hair. It had long whiskers, large eyes, and erect ears. When it rose out the water to observe his ship, Steller saw that it had no flippers.
For two hours Steller and the animal watched each other. It passed some 30 times under the ship, he said, apparently in order to view it from both sides. At one point it juggled a bit of kelp in its mouth, occasionally biting off and swallowing pieces. An assistant finally shot at it twice with a musket, missing both times, and the animal disappeared.
In 250 years, no one has ever seen another “sea ape.” The consensus among biologists is that Steller saw a young northern fur seal, but he had observed these creatures on the same voyage and presumably would have recognized one. So what was it?
Shocking!
Unfortunate literary non-sequiturs:
“Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.” — George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
“She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.” — Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
“‘Oh, I can’t explain!’ cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. ‘I’ve only one way of expressing my deepest feelings–it’s this.’ And he swung his tool.” — Henry James, Roderick Hudson
“Mrs Ray declared that she had not found it all hard, and then,–with a laudable curiosity, seeing how little she had known about balls,–desired to have an immediate account of Rachel’s doings.” — Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray
“The organ ‘gins to swell;
She’s coming, she’s coming!
My lady comes at last …”
— W.M. Thackeray, “At the Church Gate”
“Oh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!”
— Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”
One of two “Letters to Cynthia” in Christopher Morley’s Mince Pie (1919) is titled “In Praise of Boobs.”
Headlights
Peculiar effect of a thunderstorm near Leadhills, Lanarkshire, on June 7, 1817, reported by surgeon James Braid before the Wernerian Society and later reprinted in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:
… [T]he master of the house told me that he was very much alarmed as he was going home on Saturday evening, between six and seven o’clock, ‘from,’ as he expressed himself, ‘his horse’s ears being the same as two burning candles, and the edges of his hat being all in a flame.’ …
On Thursday 20th, I was gratified for a few minutes with the luminous appearance described above. It was about nine o’clock, P.M. I had no sooner got on horseback than I observed the tips of both the horse’s ears to be quite luminous: the edges of my hat had the same appearance.
The horse’s ears stopped glowing after a shower of moist snow, Braid reported, “but the edges of my hat, being longer of getting wet, continued to give the luminous appearance somewhat longer.”
“I could observe an immense number of minute sparks darting towards the horse’s ears and the margin of my hat, which produced a very beautiful appearance, and I was sorry to be so soon deprived of it.”
Spared
In a Word
pauciloquent
adj. uttering few words
The Paradox of Unsuccessful Intervention
Mike is overweight. His wife has just baked a cake. Happily, Mike has a box that will quiet his desire for cake. Unhappily, its battery is dead. Mike pushes the button, nothing happens, and he eats the cake.
Now, the fact that he pushed the button shows that his desire to avoid cake was greater than his desire to eat cake. So why did he push the button?
Mrs. Miniver’s Problem
One of Jan Struther’s popular stories of the 1930s included the following passage:
She saw every relationship as a pair of intersecting circles. It would seem at first glance that the more they overlapped the better the relationship; but this is not so. Beyond a certain point the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there are not enough private resources left on either side to enrich the life that is shared. Probably perfection is reached when the area of the two outer crescents, added together, is exactly equal to that of the leaf-shaped piece in the middle. On paper there must be some neat mathematical formula for arriving at this; in life, none.
Interestingly, mathematicians who pursued the problem found that no precise solution is possible. With circles, as with relationships, we have to do the best we can.