In 1984, a pet kitten was given to Koko, the Stanford University gorilla who communicates through sign language.
She cared for it as a baby gorilla until December of that year, when the cat escaped from her cage and was run down by a car.
When her trainers told Koko what had happened, she gave the signs for two words.
They were “cry” and “sad.”
It’s been known since 1876 that 267-1 isn’t prime, but for decades no one knew what the factors were.
Then, at a meeting in 1903, mathematician Frank Nelson Cole gave an hourlong “lecture” in which he didn’t say a word. On one chalkboard he expanded the value of 267-1:
147,573,952,589,676,412,927
On another he wrote:
193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287
Then he multiplied those values by hand. The two boards matched. He had found the factors. Cole returned to his seat amid a standing ovation.
He later admitted that finding the factors had taken “three years of Sundays.”
Isaac Asimov proposed this mnemonic for a famous constant:
How I want a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Count the letters in each word and you’ll get 3.14159265358979.
Excerpt from the will of Joseph Dalby, London, 1784:
I give to my daughter Ann Spencer, a guinea for a ring, or any other bauble she may like better: — I give to the lout, her husband, one penny, to buy him a lark-whistle; I also give to her said husband, of redoubtable memory, my fart-hole, for a covering for his lark-whistle, to prevent the abrasion of his lips; and this legacy I give him as a mark of my approbation of his prowess and nice honour, in drawing his sword on me, (at my own table), naked and unarmed as I was, and he well fortified with custard.
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?’
On June 18, 1178, five monks at Canterbury reported witnessing a catastrophe in the sky:
There was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance.
Stony Brook earth scientist Jack Hartung speculates that this may have been an impact event that created the 20-kilometer crater Giordano Bruno.
Pity Lal Bihari: In 1976 the Indian farmer applied for a bank loan and learned he was dead. His uncle had arranged it in order to get control of his land.
This is fairly common in the crowded northern state of Uttar Pradesh, and it creates an odd predicament: If you complain too much about being dead, your enemies might kill you for real.
The struggle led Bihari to make some strangely existential demonstrations. He added the word “dead” to his name, signed his letters as the “late” Lal Bihari, organized his own funeral, and demanded a widow’s compensation for his wife.
Finally he was recalled to life in 1994, after 18 years in the grave. But the “association of the dead” that he founded has now grown to 20,000 members.
On Dec. 1, 1948, a bather discovered a body on the beach near Adelaide, Australia. The man appeared to be European, about 45 years old, well dressed, and in excellent physical condition. Indeed, the coroner could not determine a cause of death. Still more strangely, it seemed the man had carried no money, and all identifying marks had been removed from his clothes. Apparently he had left a suitcase at the Adelaide railway station, but it contained no useful clues. Photos and fingerprints were circulated throughout the English-speaking world, but no one identified him.
And the body bore one last strange clue: In a trouser fob pocket, one of the investigators found a tiny piece of paper bearing the words “Taman Shud.” Those are the final words in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; they mean “The End.” A local doctor came forward with a copy of that book, from which the words had been clipped. He had found it tossed on the front seat of his car the day before the body was found.
But even that clue went nowhere. To this day, no one knows who the man was or how he died. He’s known only as the Somerton man.
“A young lady, newly married, being obliged to show her Husband all the Letters she wrote, sent the following to an intimate friend.”
Reveal the Secret
I cannot be satisfied, my dearest Friend,
blest as I am in the matrimonial state,
unless I pour into your friendly bosom,
which has ever beat in unison with mine,
the various sensations which swell
with the liveliest emotion of pleasure,
my almost bursting heart. I tell you my dear
husband is the most amiable of men,
I have now been married seven weeks, and
never have found the least reason to
repent the day that joined us. My husband is
both in person and manners far from resembling
ugly, cross, old, disagreeable, and jealous
monsters, who think by confining to secure —
a wife, it is his maxim to treat as a
bosom friend and confidant, and not as a
plaything, or menial slave, the woman
chosen to be his companion. Neither party
he says, should always obey implicitly;
but each yield to the other by turns.
An ancient maiden aunt, near seventy,
a cheerful, venerable, and pleasant old lady,
lives in the house with us; she is the de-
light of both young and old; she is ci-
vil to all the neighborhood round,
generous and charitable to the poor.
I am convinced my husband loves nothing more
than he does me; he flatters me more
than a glass; and his intoxication
(for so I must call the excess of his love)
often makes me blush for the unworthiness
of its object, and wish I could be more deserving
of the man whose name I bear. To
say all in one word, my dear, and to
crown the whole — my former gallant lover
is now my indulgent husband; my husband
is returned, and I might have had
a prince without the felicity I find in
him. Adieu! may you be as blest as I am un-
able to wish that I could be more
happy!
“The key is to read the first and then every alternate line only.”
— Charles Bombaugh, Facts and Fancies for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1860
If you hear the words “castle thunder,” you probably think of a particular sound effect. That’s not surprising — recorded originally for the 1931 version of Frankenstein, that sound been reused in numerous Disney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Scooby-Doo, Gilligan’s Island, and countless movies, including Citizen Kane, Cleopatra, The Hindenburg, Ghostbusters, Airplane!, Murder by Death, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Clue, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Trading Places, Short Circuit, Star Wars, The Monster Squad, Death Becomes Her, and Young Frankenstein. You can even hear it in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
See Wilhelm Scream for another famous effect.