Euphony

James Joyce thought cuspidor the most beautiful word in the English language. Arnold Bennett chose pavement. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cellar door had an especially beautiful sound.

These may seem odd choices, because it’s hard to separate sound from sense. “The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word,” wrote Max Beerbohm, “is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.”

Beerbohm once pressed this point with his friend Robert Hichens (related in David Cecil’s 1964 biography Max):

One day [Beerbohm] said to Hichens, ‘Do you think, Crotchet, that a word can be beautiful, just one word?’

‘Yes,’ Hichens said, ‘I can think of several words that seem to me beautiful.’

‘Ah?’

A pause.

‘Then tell me, do you think the word ermine is a beautiful word?’

‘Yes,’ Hichens said, ‘I like the sound of it very much.’

‘Ah?’

Another pause.

‘And do you think vermin is a beautiful word?’

| Language

Are We Tilting?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mean_ctr_pop_US_1790-2000.png

Make a rigid map of the United States and add a weight for each person in the country. Then try to balance it on your finger.

In 1790, you’d find a neat equilibrium point under Chestertown, Md. — but you’d have to keep shifting as settlers moved west. By 1850 the balance point had slid into West Virginia; in 1900 it reached Indiana.

It’s still moving. During the 20th century, the point shifted another 324 miles to the west, into Phelps County, Mo. That includes a dramatic jump of 10 miles in a single year — in 1960, when Alaska and Hawaii first appeared on the census.

| History

“Odd Bill for Repairs”

One meets with curious things in the old church registers of England. The subjoined, in the Record Office of Winchester Cathedral, dated 1182, is certainly unique. It is a bill for work done: —

To soldering and repairing St. Joseph, 0 l. 8 d.
To cleaning and ornamenting the Holy Ghost, 0 l. 6 d.
To repairing the Virgin Mary and cleaning the child, 4 l. 8 d.
To screwing a nose on the Devil, and putting in the hair on his head, and placing a new joint in his tail, 5 l. 6 d.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical (1882)

| Language · Religion

R.I.P.

Ruth Sprague, Daughter of Gibson and Elizabeth Sprague.
Died June 11, 1846, aged 9 years, 4 months, and 3 days.
She was stolen from the grave by Roderick R. Clow, dissected
at Dr. P.M. Armstrong’s office, in Hoosick, N. Y., from which
place her mutilated remains were obtained and deposited here.

Her body dissected by fiendish man,
Her bones anatomized,
Her soul, we trust, has risen to God,
Where few physicians rise.

— Epitaph, Hoosick Falls, N.Y.

| Death

Hugh Williams

In the year 1664, on the 5th of December, a boat on the Menai, crossing that strait, with eighty-one passengers, was upset, and only one passenger, named Hugh Williams, was saved. On the same day, in the year 1785, was upset another boat, containing about sixty persons, and every soul perished, with the exception of one, whose name also was Hugh Williams. And on the 5th of August, 1820, a third boat met the same disaster; but the passengers of this were no more than twenty-five, and, singular to relate, the whole perished with the exception of one, whose name was Hugh Williams.

— Bristol Mercury, cited in The Lives and Portraits of Curious and Odd Characters, 1852

| Oddities