Mail Call

From Andrew Carroll’s Behind the Lines (2005) — during World War II, the parents of William Kyzer received this letter from their son, an infantry rifleman stationed in the Pacific:

Dear Dad & Carmilita

I’m OK, days flies by here in

Well maybe it can be all again soon. I’m praying for it. Write soon Nothing like getting a letter from home. Here on

Love

Bill

P.S. They may censor this letter

Carroll writes: “In fact, Kyzer’s mail was not edited at all; he simply hated writing letters and only penned the few sentences at the top and bottom so that his folks would believe that the censors were responsible for slicing out the rest.”

Achilles Recalled

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A fragment from Lewis Carroll, Nov. 22, 1874:

A. And thus your favourite paradox, my dear D., is finally disproved of, and Achilles and the Tortoise will walk off hand in hand. No argument of any sort can be maintained, which would prove him not to overtake it.

D. No mathematical argument, you mean; for, if you permit me a classical one, I will contend that the Tortoise was nothing but the “Testudo” of the ancients, a machine of common use in Sieges — that it was at that moment moving against the walls of Troy — and that the true reason why Achilles did not overtake it was simply that he was sulking in his tent and never went near it.

S. I beg to limit this discussion to mathematical argument.

D. Be it so. And the mathematical argument you dispose of, as I understand you, by the assertion that we find ourselves at last among indivisible distances and indivisible periods of time, and thus you propose to plunge us, however reluctant we may be to take the leap, into the dark abyss of the Inconceivable?

S. That is my solution of the paradox.

D. Granting, for argument’s sake, that the paradox is thus finally disposed of, let me ask you a question or two. These indivisible distances — are they equal, or unequal?

S. Am I bound to choose one or other of these categories?

D. I fear I can offer you no third.

S. Well then, as I do not clearly see what you are aiming at, I will, for the present, say “unequal,” reserving to myself however the right of substituting “equal” should I see reason to do so.

D. The privilege is an unusual one, but I will not object to your exercising it. Let them then be: unequal. Now take two of these unequal distances: lay them side by side, so as to coincide at one end: will they coincide at the other end also?

S. Surely not.

D. There will therefore be a difference between them: and this difference, being homogeneous with the things differing, will itself be a distance?

S. I cannot deny it.

D. Divisible, shall we say? Or indivisible?

S. (laughing) Indivisible, of course. You would not wish me to imagine a divisible distance less than an indivisible one?

D. You shall please yourself in that matter. Let me now add together these two lesser indivisible distances. Will their sum total be divisible or indivisible, think you?

S. (after a pause) It occurs to me that I would rather take the other horn of your dilemma, and say that these indivisible distances are all equal.

D. With all my heart. They shall now be all equal. And we will suppose that Achilles has just passed over one of the indivisible distances. What time would you say that he occupied in doing so?

S. An indivisible time, clearly.

D. But the Tortoise had previously passed over the same indivisible distance: how long do you suppose he took to do it?

S. As he travelled at only half the pace of Achilles, it is evident that he required two of our indivisible periods of time.

D. No doubt. But now tell me — at the end of the first of these indivisible periods of time, where had the Tortoise got to?

S. I will trouble you to pass the wine. I think I should like another half-glass of sherry.

Pleased to Meet You

Unusual personal names collected by onomasticist Elsdon C. Smith for his Treasury of Name Lore, 1967:

  • Dr. Pacifico D. Quitiquit
  • Lala Legattee Wiggins
  • Stanley Toogood
  • Effie Bowleg
  • Polycarp Pridgen
  • Merriweather Trivelpiece
  • Aspidia Snitch
  • Tabaca Blacksheep
  • Iva Headache
  • Marietta Avenue Jeeter
  • Vaseline Malaria
  • Soda Water
  • Ten Million
  • St. Elmo Bug
  • Fice Mook
  • Trammer W. Splown
  • Gulley Cowsert
  • Buckshot Magonicle
  • Teemer Furr
  • Sepnoress Gorce
  • Heathcliff Heimerdinger
  • Honeysuckle Ginsberg
  • Ephraim Very Ott
  • Gladys Whysoglad
  • Park A. Carr
  • Creekmore Fath
  • May June July
  • Melody Tunes
  • Ann Ant
  • Fairy Duck
  • Vito d’Incognito
  • Napoleon N. Waterloo
  • Tressanela Noosepickle
  • Osbel Irizarry
  • Athelstan Spilhaus
  • Weikko Tinklepaugh
  • Twilladeen Hubkapiller

According to the Veterans Administration, Love’n Kisses Love is a deceased sailor formerly of Bremerton, Washington. Walt Disney employed an animator named T. Hee. Outerbridge Horsey VI was named ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1963. (“I am the sixth Outerbridge Horsey and my unhappy son is the seventh. In fact, the only trouble with any new post is explaining the name to people.”) Gisella Werberzerck Piffl was a character actress in Australia in 1948. Two police officers who worked together in Long Beach, California, in 1953 were named Goforth and Ketchum. Jack Benny’s wife said that the firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now BBDO) “sounds like a trunk falling down stairs.”

And “When Mrs. Rum of Chicago divorced her husband she was allowed to resume her maiden name of Cork.”

See Local Color, Roll Call, Pink Labels, Roll Call, Roll Call, and Bent Handles.

The Battle of the Reed Rules

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Until 1890, the minority party in the U.S. House of Representatives could block a vote by “disappearing”; they’d demand a roll call, remain silent when called upon, and then declare that too few members were “present” for the House to conduct its business.

To incoming speaker Thomas Brackett Reed this was a “tyranny of the minority,” and on Jan. 28 he resolved to break it. When Democrats demanded a roll call and refused to answer to their names, Reed marked them present anyway; when Kentucky representative James B. McCreary objected, Reed said sweetly, “The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman from Kentucky is present. Does he deny it?”

There followed a sort of ontological shooting gallery. Democrats hid under their desks and behind screens to avoid being observed to exist. When they tried to flee the chamber entirely, Reed ordered the doors locked, which started a scramble to get out before the next vote. Representative Kilgore of Texas had to kick open a locked door to escape. Amid the howled objections, Confederate general “Fighting Joe” Wheeler came down from the rear “leaping from desk to desk as an ibex leaps from crag to crag,” and one unnamed Texas Democrat “sat in his seat significantly whetting a bowie knife on his boot.” Finally the Republicans mustered a majority even with the Democrats entirely absent, and the battle was over: Reed’s new rules were adopted on February 14.

Throughout all this Reed had seemed imperturbable, “serene as a summer morning.” He told a friend later that he had made up his mind what he would do if the House did not support him. “I would simply have left the Chair and resigned the Speakership and my seat in Congress,” he said. “I had made up my mind that if political life consisted in sitting helplessly in the Speaker’s Chair and seeing the majority helpless to pass legislation, I had had enough of it and was ready to step down and out.”

(From Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower.) (Thanks, Zach.)

Sallie

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Image: Flickr

The 11th Pennsylania infantry regiment was beginning its training at the fairground in West Chester, Pa., in 1861 when a local resident presented a wicker basket to one of the officers. In the basket was a 4-week-old black female terrier puppy. The dog, quickly named Sallie after a local beauty whom the soldiers admired, made hundreds of friends among the men and was adopted as the regiment’s official mascot.

“Sallie knew the drumroll announcing reveille,” writes James Robertson in The Untold Civil War. “She was first out of quarters to attend roll call. During drills, she latched on to a particular soldier and pranced alongside him throughout the exercise. At dress parade, the dog marched proudly beside the regimental colors. At encampments, she slept by the captain’s tent after strolling leisurely through the grounds on her own kind of inspection.”

She accompanied the regiment into battle at Cedar Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, standing stoutly on the front lines and barking ferociously at the enemy. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln tipped his hat to her as he reviewed the Army of the Potomac. On the first day’s fighting at Gettysburg, the regiment was driven back a mile from its original position and she was feared lost; she was discovered three days later standing guard over the wounded and the dead.

She survived, in fact, nearly to the end of the war. On Feb. 5, 1865, at the Battle of Hatcher’s Run during the Siege of Petersburg, men in the second wave of a Union attack found her dead on the battlefield, shot through the head. She had died instantly.

In 1890, the surviving veterans of the 11th Pennsylvania erected a monument at Gettysburg. From a distance it looks like other regimental memorials, a defiant soldier atop a marble pedestal. But on a ledge near the base of the monument lies a small bronze dog.

Local Color

Unusual names recorded in the American South by University of Florida linguist Thomas Pyles, 1986:

  • Oleander Lafayette Fitzgerald III
  • Ed Ek
  • Shellie Swilley
  • Early Hawaiian McKinnon
  • Sandy Gandy
  • Earl Curl Jr.
  • Percy Nursey
  • Rev. Fay de Sha
  • Lovie Slappey
  • Esperanza Le Socke
  • Pamela Gay Day
  • Staff-Sgt. Mehogany Brewer
  • Girlie Burns
  • Fawn Grey Trawick Dunkle
  • Alure Sweat
  • Bloomer Bedenbaugh
  • Martha Magdalene Toot
  • Okla Bobo
  • Melody Clinkenbeard

Cowboy Pink Williams served as lieutenant governor of Oklahoma from 1955 to 1959. And “The children of Mr. Stanford Bardwell, a realtor and a graduate of Louisiana State University, and his wife Loyola, are Stanford, Jr., Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Auburn, and the twins Duke and T’lane. When the Bardwells go on holiday they travel in a specially equipped school bus called the ‘Collegiate Caravan.'”

(Thomas Pyles, “Bible Belt Onomastics or Some Curiosities of Anti-Pedobaptist Nomenclature,” in Names and Their Varieties, American Name Society, 1986.) See Roll Call and Pink Labels.

Word Ladders

On Christmas Day 1877, assailed by two young ladies with “nothing to do,” Lewis Carroll invented a new “form of verbal torture”: Presented with two words of the same length, the solver must convert one to the other by changing a single letter at a time, with each step producing a valid English word. For example, HEAD can be converted to TAIL in five steps:

HEAD
HEAL
TEAL
TELL
TALL
TAIL

Carroll called the new pastime Doublets and published it in Vanity Fair, which hailed it as “so entirely novel and withal so interesting, that … the Doublets may be expected to become an occupation to the full as amusing as the guessing of the Double Acrostics has already proved.”

In some puzzles the number of steps is specified. In Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the narrator describes a friend who was addicted to “word golf.” “He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him. Some of my records are: HATE-LOVE in three, LASS-MALE in four, and LIVE-DEAD in five (with LEND in the middle).” I’ve been able to solve the first two of these fairly easily, but not the last.

But even without such a constraint, some transformations require a surprising number of steps. Carroll found that 10 were required to turn BLUE into PINK, and in 1968 wordplay expert Dmitri Borgmann declared himself unable to convert ABOVE into BELOW at all.

In a computer study of 5,757 five-letter English words, Donald Knuth found that most could be connected to one another, but 671 could not. One of these, fittingly, was ALOOF. In the wider English language, what proportion of words are “aloof,” words that cannot be connected to any of their fellows? Is ALOOF itself one of these?

In 1917 Sam Loyd and Thomas Edison made this short, which plays with similar ideas. The goat at the end was animated by Willis O’Brien, who would bring King Kong to life 16 years later:

Bid the Tree Unfix

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In 1880, an 800-year-old yew tree was threatening the west wall of the church of St Andrew at Buckland in Dover. The community called in landscape gardener William Barron, who solved the problem by boring tunnels under the trunk and then raising the tree’s entire 55-ton mass onto rollers by means of powerful screw jacks. Giant windlasses could then haul the tree 203 feet across the churchard to a safer location.

“The scale of this operation was probably never matched,” writes G.M.F. Drower in Garden of Invention, his 2003 history of gardening innovations. “[A]nd Barron, who had been rather more apprehensive than he let on, later admitted that all the other trees he had moved had been ‘chickens compared to the Buckland Yew.'”

Being There

The 1937 phrasebook Collins’ Pocket Interpreters: France paints an alarming picture of a typical visit to France:

I cannot open my case.
I have lost my keys.
I did not know that I had to pay.
I cannot find my porter.
Excuse me, sir, that seat is mine.
I cannot find my ticket!
I have left my gloves (my purse) in the dining car.
I feel sick.
The noise is terrible.
Did you not get my letter?
I cannot sleep at night, there is so much noise.
There are no towels here.
The sheets on this bed are damp.
I have seen a mouse in the room.
These shoes are not mine.
The radiator doesn’t work.
This is not clean, bring me another.
I can’t eat this. Take it away!
The water is too hot, you are scalding me!
It doesn’t work.
This doesn’t smell very nice.
There is a mistake in the bill.
I am lost.
Someone robbed me.
I shall call a policeman.
That man is following me everywhere.
There has been an accident!
She has been run over.
He is losing blood.
He has lost consciousness.

James Thurber, who came upon the book in a London bookshop, described it as a “melancholy narrative poem” and “a dramatic tragedy of an overwhelming and original kind.” “I have come across a number of these helps-for-travelers,” he wrote, “but none has the heavy impact, the dark, cumulative power of Collins’. … The volume contains three times as many expressions to use when one is in trouble as when everything is going all right.”

I can’t find the 1937 edition that Thurber describes, but this seems to be a 1962 update.

Oh

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Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

This is a floodlight photographed at night. What are the segmented stalks that seem to surround it? The phenomenon is seen regularly in photographs and videos; cryptozoologists and students of UFOs call the entities rods.

In 2003 author Robert Todd Carroll consulted entomologist Doug Yanega, who explained that they’re flying insects (in this case moths).

“Essentially what you see is several wingbeat cycles of the insect on each frame of the video, creating the illusion of a ‘rod’ with bulges along its length,” Yanega wrote. “The blurred body of the insect as it moves forward forms the ‘rod,’ and the oscillation of the wings up and down form the bulges.”

“Some hilarious photographs of ‘rods’ have been posted on the Internet,” Carroll noted. “My favorite is ‘the swallow chases a rod’ which looks just like a bird going after an insect.”