Search Results for: in a word

History Denied

In 1997, University of Edinburgh linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum submitted the following letter to the Economist:

‘Connections needed’ (March 15) reports that Russia’s Transneft pipeline operator is not able to separate crude flows from different oil fields: ‘they all come out swirled into a single bland blend.’ This is quite true. And worse yet, the characterless, light-colored mix thus produced is concocted blindly, without quality oversight, surely a grave mistake. In fact, I do not recall ever encountering a blinder blander blonder blender blunder.

It “would have been a true first in natural language text,” Pullum wrote, “a grammatical and meaningful sequence of five consecutive words in a natural context that are differentiated from each other by just a single character.” Alas, the Economist chose not to print it.

| Language

“That”

I’ll prove the word that I have made my theme
Is that that may be doubled without blame,
And that that that thus trebled I may use
And that that that that critics may abuse
May be correct. Yet more–the dons to bother–
Five thats may closely follow one another:
For well ’tis known that we may safely write
That that that that that man writ was right.
Nay, e’en that that that that that that followed
Through six repeats the grammar’s rule has hallowed,
And that that that (that that that that began)
Repeated seven times is right! Deny’t who can.

— Anonymous

| Language

Hidden in Sight

This puzzling verse, from a contributor named “Maude,” appeared in the Weekly Wisconsin of Sept. 29, 1888:

Perhaps the solvers are inclined to hiss,
Curling their nose up at a con like this.
Like some much abler posers I would try
A rare, uncommon puzzle to supply.
A curious acrostic here you see
Rough hewn and inartistic tho’ it be;
Still it is well to have it understood,
I could not make it plainer, if I would.

(In the second line, “con” means “contribution.”)

What are the concealed words?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Love’s Labour’s Lost

The diary of Elizabethan lawyer John Manningham reveals a Bugs-Bunny-like episode from the life of William Shakespeare. When Richard Burbidge was playing Richard III, a female audience member “greue soe farr in liking wth him” that she asked him to visit her that evening using the name Richard III. Shakespeare overheard this, beat Burbidge to the lady’s house and “was intertained.” When word came that Richard III was at the door, Manningham says, Shakespeare sent the reply that “William the Conqueror came before Richard III.”

Is it true? Who cares?

| Literature

Speaking in Tongues

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giuseppe-Caspar-Mezzofanti.jpg

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was keeper of the Vatican library and later a cardinal, but he’s best remembered for being a hyperpolyglot, a speaker of many languages.

How many? Estimates range from 24 (in 1805) to 114 (judged after his death). The true number probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s considerable–Byron called Mezzofanti “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech.”

A Russian traveler once asked Mezzofanti for a list of the dialects he had mastered, and the cardinal sent him the name of God in 56 languages. And Gregory XVI once arranged to have a polyglot group of students waylay him in the Vatican gardens: “[O]n a sudden, at a given signal, these youths grouped themselves for a moment on their knees before his Holiness, and then, quickly rising, addressed themselves to Mezzofanti, each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand, them. But Mezzofanti did not shrink from the conflict. With the promptness and address which were peculiar to him, he took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language, with such spirit and elegance as to amaze them all.”

For another prodigious librarian, see Book Lover.

| Oddities

Greek and Roman

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mesembryanthemumcryst2.jpg

The South African flower Mesembryanthemum draws its name from the Greek roots for middle, embryo, and flower.

It’s believed to be the English word containing the highest “score” in Roman numerals — four Ms.

| Language

Bent Lines

Slips of the tongue are often made on the stage, even by the most prominent actors and actresses. Mrs. Langtry at one performance said to her stage lover, ‘Let us retire and seek a nosey cook.’

An actor at the Queen’s Theatre, Manchester, turned ‘Stand back, my lord, and let the coffin pass’ into, ‘Stand back, my lord, and let the parson cough.’ …

A well-known actor who has often been applauded by New York theater-goers, in one of his speeches intended to say, ‘Royal bold Caesar,’ but forgot himself in his excitement and said, ‘Boiled rolled Caesar, I present thee with my sword.’

— John De Morgan, In Lighter Vein, 1907

| Entertainment · Language

New-Minted Coins

Words of which William Shakespeare was the only recorded user, at some point, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

  • bepray
  • bragless
  • compulsative
  • conceptious
  • confineless
  • continuantly
  • correctioner
  • disliken
  • exceptless
  • exsufflicate
  • foxship
  • insultment
  • oathable
  • offendress
  • omittance
  • overgreen
  • overstink
  • questant
  • razorable
  • successantly
  • thoughten
  • uprighteously
  • wenchless

In Inventing English, Stanford literary historian Seth Lerer credits him with inventing nearly 6,000 new words.

| Language

Good News!

[A]dvertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

— T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906

| Society

Education Reconsidered

Reflect, Socrates; you may have to deny your words.

I have reflected, I said; and I shall never deny my words.

Well, said he, and so you say that you wish Cleinias to become wise?

Undoubtedly.

And he is not wise as yet?

At least his modesty will not allow him to say that he is.

You wish him, he said, to become wise, and not to be ignorant?

That we do.

You wish him to be what he is not, and no longer to be what he is?

I was thrown into consternation at this.

Taking advantage of my consternation he added: You wish him no longer to be what he is, which can only mean that you wish him to perish. Pretty lovers and friends they must be who want their favourite not to be, or to perish!

— Plato, Euthydemus

| Science & Math