Early one morning in 1912, the residents of Villisca, Iowa, discovered a horrible scene: An entire family had been brutally murdered in their sleep. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the gruesome crime, which has baffled investigators for a hundred years.
We’ll also follow the further adventures of German sea ace Felix von Luckner and puzzle over some fickle bodyguards.
Large as the English word-stock is, it is not perfect. There are a number of situations which other languages have a single word for, but which English must express by circumlocution. Some of these were described by Dmitri Borgmann in the February 1970 Word Ways. For example, the English phrase ONE AND ONE HALF is succinctly described by Polish POLTORA, German ANDERTHALB or Latin SESQUIALTER. (In fact the Polish even have the word POLOSMA for SEVEN AND ONE HALF!) Similarly, English THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY is more compactly expressed by German VORGESTERN or Spanish ANTEAYER, and English THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW by German UBERMORGEN, Italian DOPODOMANI or Polish POJUTRZE. To express relationships, German uses GESCHWISTER for BROTHERS AND SISTERS, Polish uses STRYJ for the paternal uncle and WUJ for the maternal uncle, and SZWAGROSTWO for one’s husband’s brother and his wife.
— A. Ross Eckler, “English: Best For(e)play With Words,” Word Ways, August 2008
The American Mathematical Monthly of January 1959 notes an “interesting Pythagorean triangle” discovered by Victor Thébault: If the two perpendicular sides of a right triangle measure 88209 and 90288, then the hypotenuse is 126225.
In other words, if you sum the squares of 88209 and its reverse, the result is a perfect square.
Flying alone over France in April 1917, German flying ace Ernst Udet engaged another lone pilot in aerial combat. The other pilot, a Frenchman, was exceptionally talented, anticipating all of Udet’s moves and reacting instantly. “Sometimes we pass so closely I can clearly recognize a narrow, pale face under the leather helmet,” Udet wrote later. “On the fuselage, between the wings, there is a word in black letters. As he passes me for the fifth time, so close that his propwash shakes me back and forth, I can make it out: ‘Vieux‘ it says there — vieux — the old one. That’s Guynemer’s sign.”
Guynemer was Georges Guynemer, France’s top fighter ace, who had brought down 30 Germans in fights like this. “Slowly I realize his superiority,” Udet wrote. “His aircraft is better, he can do more than I, but I continue to fight.” For a moment he managed to get Guynemer into his sights, but he found that his gun wouldn’t fire — it was blocked.
Udet tried to clear the stoppage by hand but failed. He considered diving away but knew that Guynemer would instantly shoot him down. They circled one another for another eight minutes as Udet sought to evade the Frenchman’s guns. When Guynemer swooped overhead, Udet hammered the gun with his fists and then realized his mistake:
Guynemer has observed this from above, he must have seen it, and now he knows what gives with me. He knows I’m helpless prey.
Again he skims over me, almost on his back. Then it happens: he sticks out his hand and waves to me, waves lightly, and dives to the west in the direction of his lines.
I fly home. I’m numb.
“There are people who claim Guynemer had a stoppage himself then,” Udet wrote in Ace of the Iron Cross. “Others claim he feared I might ram him in desperation. But I don’t believe any of them. I still believe to this day that a bit of chivalry from the past has continued to survive. For this reason I lay this belated wreath on Guynemer’s unknown grave.”
Lewis Carroll sent this poem to Mabel and Emily Kerr on May 20, 1871. He titled it “A Double Acrostic” — but where is the acrostic?
Thanks, thanks, fair Cousins, for your gift
So swiftly borne to Albion’s isle —
Though angry waves their crests uplift
Between our shores, for many a league!
(“So far, so good,” you say: “but how
Your Cousins?” Let me tell you, Madam.
We’re both descended, you’ll allow,
From one great-great-great-grandsire, Noah.)
Your picture shall adorn the book
That’s bound, so neatly and moroccoly,
With that bright green which every cook
Delights to see in beds of cauliflower.
The carte is very good, but pray
Send me the larger one as well!
“A cool request!” I hear you say.
“Give him an inch, he takes an acre!
“But we’ll be generous because
We well remember, in the story,
How good and gentle Alice was,
The day she argued with the Parrot!”
Lewis Carroll
The last word in each stanza is a red herring. Replace each with the proper rhyme and then list these five words:
Mile
Adam
Broccoli
Ell
Lory
Their first and last letters spell MABEL and EMILY.
An aviators’ drinking song from World War I, from James Gilbert’s 1978 anthology Skywriting:
A young aviator lay dying
At the end of a bright summer’s day.
His comrades had gathered around him
To carry his fragments away.
The aeroplane was piled on his wishbone,
His Lewis was wrapped round his head,
He wore a spark plug in each elbow,
‘Twas plain he would shortly be dead.
He spat out a valve and a gasket
As he stirred in the sump where he lay,
And then to his wondering comrades
These brave parting words did he say:
“Take the manifold out of my larynx
And the butterfly valve off my neck.
Remove from my kidneys the camrods;
There’s a lot of good parts in this wreck.
“Take the piston rings out of my stomach,
And the cylinders out of my brain.
Extract from my liver the crankshaft,
And assemble the engine again.
“Pull the longeron out of my backbone,
The turnbuckle out of my ear,
From the small of my back take the rudder —
There’s all of your aeroplane here.”
Here’s the opening of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading.
Choose any of the first 12 words and tap your way forward in the sentence from that point, tapping one word for each letter. So, for example, if you choose the word Alice, which has five letters, you’d tap was, beginning, to, get, and land on very. Then do the same thing with that word, advancing four letters to land on by. If you keep this up you’ll always arrive at the word sister.
That’s from Martin Gardner; the same trick works with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the opening of the Bible, and countless other texts.
It’s less surprising than it seems — it’s based on a principle called the Kruskal count, proffered originally by Rutgers physicist Martin Kruskal as a card trick. In each case various tributaries merge into a common stream that arrives at a predictable destination. Here’s an analysis (PDF).
Further excerpts from the notebooks of English belletrist Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947):
“Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.” — George Eliot
Wit is a new and apt relation of ideas: humour, of images.
Use of words “vision” and “supremely” an infallible sign of the uneducated.
“No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the length that may be necessary.” — Horace Walpole
“Precautions are always blamed. When successful, they are said to be unnecessary.” — Benjamin Jowett
“Some speak and write as if they wanted to say something: others as if they had something to say.” — Archbishop Richard Whately
“A rose has no back.” — Chinese reply if you apologize for turning your back
Reasonable to ask young people to be adventurous, to go to the North Pole, say: but religion asks them to start off, without being sure if there is a North Pole.
Three pieces of earnest advice from the Revd. H.J. Bidder, aged 86, after sitting silent, with a crumpled face, all through dinner, and once loudly asking the man opposite who I was:
1. Never drink claret in an East wind.
2. Take your pleasures singly, one by one.
3. Never sit on a hard chair after drinking port.
In 1939, an ocean liner carrying 900 Jewish refugees left Nazi Germany seeking sanctuary in North America, but it was turned away by every nation it appealed to. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the so-called “voyage of the damned” and the plight of its increasingly desperate passengers.
We’ll also discuss the employment prospects for hermits in Seattle and puzzle over the contentment of a condemned woman.
The word cliché was originally the French name for a printing plate that was prepared for convenience to print a commonly used phrase. The plates clicked as they were being used, and cliché is the past participle of clicher, a variant of cliquer, “to click.”
Interestingly, another name for this plate is stereotype.
