“Hallelujah!” was the only observation
That escaped Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Jane,
When she tumbled off the platform in the station,
And was cut in little pieces by the train.
Mary Jane, the train is through yer:
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!
We will gather up the fragments that remain.
— A.E. Housman
From Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s The Book of Modern Puzzles (1954):
“If all MULDRUFFS and all WALLAXES are predominantly RED throughout, what is the largest possible number of green SLACKENS in a WALLAX?”
Visiting Hamburg in 1878, Mark Twain heard a cuckoo calling in the woods.
“First cuckoo I ever heard outside of a clock,” he wrote. “Was surprised how closely it imitated the clock — and yet of course it could never have heard a clock.”
He added, “The hatefulest thing in the world is a cuckoo clock.”
(From his Notebook.)
English essayist Henry W. Nevinson defined chivalry as “going about releasing beautiful maidens from other men’s castles, and taking them to your own castle.”
In 1814, as the British burned Washington, commander Sir George Cockburn targeted the offices of the National Intelligencer newspaper, telling his troops, “Be sure that all the C’s are destroyed, so that the rascals cannot any longer abuse my name.”
British politician Thomas Erskine (1750-1823) had such an enormous ego that, it was said, one newspaper had to curtail its coverage because its “stock of capital I’s was quite exhausted.”
Alsatian pastor J.G. Stuber composed this puzzle canon in the late 18th century.
“It was always a great delight to me, in riding my horse from one village to another, to hear in the fields and among the heights the melodies which I had taught,” he wrote. “I could often distinguish very beautiful and harmonious voices.”
As Governor of Mauritius, [Theodore] Hook ruled for five years before being accused of embezzling 12,000 pounds of public funds. He was dismissed from his post and returned to England, where he told friends that his dismissal was ‘on account of a disorder in my chest.’
— Victor Margolin, “The Pun Is Mightier Than the Sword: A Short History of Paronomasia,” Verbatim, Summer 1980
The infinite series 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + 1/256 + … was one of the first to be summed in the history of mathematics; Archimedes had found by 200 BC that it totals 1/3. There are two neat visual demonstrations that make this fact immediately apparent. In the unit square above, the largest black square has area 1/4, the next-largest black square has area 1/16, and so on. Regions of black, white, and gray make up equal areas in the total figure, so the black squares, taken together, must have area 1/3.
The same argument can be made using triangles (below). If the area of the largest triangle is 1, then the largest black triangle has area 1/4, the next-largest 1/16, and so on. Areas of black, white, and gray make up equal parts of the total figure, so the black regions must total 1/3.
Asked whether he could summarize the lessons of history in a short book, Columbia historian Charles Beard said he could do it in four sentences:
“No general proposition is worth a damn.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (a general proposition)
