Rivers

https://books.google.com/books?id=mE6BFXd6ppsC&pg=PA426

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them.

In ordinary text long rivers are unlikely, but in 1988 Mark Isaak found the 12-line example above on page 277 of the Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (squint to see it).

Fritzi Striebel offered a small collection of unusual rivers at the end of this article in the May 1986 issue of Word Ways.

| Literature · Technology

A Day’s Work

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968):

  • “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”)
  • “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “And then, from the doorway, a gun barked: ‘Chow-chow!’ and I went drifting to dreamland.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “The rod sneezed: ‘Chow! Ka-Chow!’ and pushed two pills through Reggie’s left thigh.” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “Against a backdrop of darkness the heater sneezed: Ka-Chowp! Chowp! Chowp! and sent three sparking ribbons of orange flame burning into the pillow.” (“Come Die for Me”)
  • “From the window behind her, a roscoe poked under the drawn blind. It went: ‘Blooey — Blooey — Blooey!’” (“Murder on the Sound Stage”)
  • “From the window that opened onto the roof-top sun deck a roscoe sneezed: Ka-Chow! Chowpf! and a red-hot hornet creased its stinger across my dome; bashed me to dreamland.” (“Lake of the Left-Hand Moon”)
  • “From the front doorway of the wigwam a roscoe stuttered: Ka-chow! Chow! Chow! and a red-hot slug maced me across the back of the cranium, knocked me into the middle of nowhere.” (“Killer’s Keepsake”)
  • “A while ago you mentioned my hardboiled rep. You said I’m considered a dangerous hombre to monkey with. Okay, you’re right. Now will you come along willingly or do I bunt you over the crumpet till your sneezer leaks buttermilk?” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the prop man’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller. A bullet can give a man a terrific case of indigestion, frequently ending in a trip to the boneyard.” (“Diamonds of Death”)
  • “‘Dan Turner squalling,’ I yeeped. ‘Flag your diapers to Sylvia Hempstead’s igloo. There’s been a croaking.'” (“Come Die for Me”)

“From the doorway a roscoe said ‘Kachow!’ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank. … She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose. … I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.”

| Literature

Roll Call

Unusual personal names collected by the Society for the Verification and Enjoyment of Fascinating Names of Actual Persons, listed by curator Allan Fotheringham in 1991:

  • Procter R. Hug
  • Polly Wanda Crocker
  • Sexious Boonjug
  • Philander Philpott Pettibone
  • Zilpher Spittle
  • Petrus J.G. Prink
  • Burke Uzzle
  • Pansy Reamsbottom
  • Dunwoody Zook
  • Bastion Hello
  • Fang W. Wang
  • Montague Tyrwhitt-Drake
  • Nimrod Spong
  • Dulcie Pillage
  • Jake Moak
  • Sir Tufton Beamish
  • Sir Basil Smallpiece
  • Sir Malby Crofton
  • St. Bodfan Grufydd
  • Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax
  • Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes
  • Selmer Hafso
  • Addylou Ebfisty Plunt
  • Oscar U. Zerk
  • Titus Cranny
  • Noble Puffer
  • J. Flipper Derricoate
  • Ovid Parody
  • J. Boxter Funderback
  • Middlebrook Polly
  • Lester Ouchmoody
  • Spencer Hum
  • A. Smerling Lecher

SVEFNAP founder Clyde Gilmour dreamed of assembling a golf foursome of Luke Feck, Bosh Stack, Fice Mork, and M. Tugrul Uke. “Gilmour imagined himself doing the introductions: ‘Feck, this is Stack. Stack … Mork. Mork … Uke. Uke … Feck …”

| Oddities

The Constitution State

What do you call a person from Connecticut? Today we’d call them a Connecticuter or a Connecticutian (or, colloquially, a Nutmegger), but in a 1987 address etymologist Allen Walker Read announced that he’d also found these options:

  • Connecticotian, used in 1702 by Cotton Mather
  • Connecticutensian, used in 1781 by historian Samuel Peters
  • Connectican, used in 1942 in a letter to the Baltimore Evening Sun
  • Connecticutan, used in 1946 by book reviewer John Cournos
  • Connecticutite, used in 1968 by an anonymous reviewer in Playboy

He also found several jocular forms:

  • Connecticutie, a pretty girl of Connecticut (used in 1938 by Frank Sullivan of Mrs. Heywood Broun and in 1947 by a journalist about Clare Boothe Luce)
  • Connecticanuck, a Connecticut person of French background
  • Connectikook, an oddball or eccentric from Connecticut
  • Connecticutup, a prankster from Connecticut

“Especially in language, exuberance accounts for much that happens.”

(Allen Walker Read, “Exuberance, a Motivation for Language,” (Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 71-74. He gives his documentation in “What Connecticut People Can Call Themselves,” Connecticut Onomastic Review No. 2, 1981, 3­-23. In 1992 he took up the same question regarding “Americans.”)

| Language

A Poem

Sydney Smith wrote a recipe for salad dressing:

Two boiled potatoes, strained through a kitchen sieve,
Softness and smoothness to the salad give;
Of mordant mustard take a single spoon —
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
True taste requires it, and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onions’ atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And lastly in the flavoured compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh, great and glorious! oh, herbaceous meat!
‘Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat.
Back to the world he’d turn his weary soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl.

In the late 19th century, such rhymes helped cooks to master recipes. When this one was reproduced in an 1871 cookbook, many committed it to memory.

| History · Literature · Poems

Inventory

Titles of paintings by Salvador Dalí:

  • Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone
  • Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello
  • Premature Ossification of a Railroad Station
  • Rock and Infuriated Horse Sleeping Under the Sea
  • Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen From Two Yards Change Into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger
  • Necrophiliac Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano
  • Dalí at the Age of Six When He Thought He Was a Girl Lifting the Skin of the Water to See the Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea
  • Skull With Its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a Bedside Table Which Should Have the Exact Temperature of a Cardinal’s Nest
  • Bread on the Head of the Prodigal Son
  • Barber Saddened by the Persistence of Good Weather (The Anguished Barber)
  • The Man With the Head of Blue Hortensias
  • A Soft Watch Put in the Appropriate Place to Cause a Young Ephebe to Die and Be Resuscitated by Excess of Satisfaction
  • Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love
  • Mysterious Mouth Appearing in the Back of My Nurse
  • Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening
  • Invisible Afghan With the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish With Three Figs
  • Giant Flying Mocca Cup With an Inexplicable Five Metre Appendage
  • Dalí’s Hand Drawing Back the Golden Fleece in the Form of a Cloud to Show Gala, Completely Nude, the Dawn, Very, Very Far Away Behind the Sun
  • Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano
  • My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture

He wrote, “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”

| Art

Product Packaging

In 1897, German mathematician August Leopold Crelle published a book listing all the products of pairs of 3-digit numbers. He offered it as a useful aid in the multiplication of large numbers. Suppose we want to multiply 26457081 by 247183. Divide each factor into 3-digit “chunks”: 026 457 081 and 247 183. Now think of each full chunk as a digit — instead of falling in the range 0-9, here each falls in the range 000-999; in effect we’re expressing each factor in base 103. With that understanding we can proceed with the arithmetic in the usual fashion. The first few partial products are 183 × 081 = 14823, 183 × 457 = 83631, and 183 × 026 = 4758; indent these successively by three places, as shown below, and continue with the rest, following the same pattern:

       26457081
       x 247183

       20007
   112879 14823
  6422 83631
     4758

  6539740652823

The user can look up all the intermediate products in Crelle’s book, so all that remains is to do the final sums. Crelle gives some further examples in the book.

In 1989, Northwestern University mathematician R.P. Boas pointed out that the same method can be used to work through ungainly problems such as 2849365028828173 × 4183920538293052 = 11921516865208167208145227753996 even on a simple 8-digit calculator, the prevailing tool at the time. Cutting these factors into 4-digit chunks reduces all the intermediate products and sums to manageable size, and the 32-digit result is reached reliably even though it would normally be beyond the calculator’s capacity.

(R.P. Boas, “Multiplying Long Numbers,” Mathematics Magazine 62:3 [June 1989], 173-174.)

| Science & Math

Procedure

The September 1981 University Computing Center Newsletter at the University of Southern California included this recipe for “Famous Rum Cake,” written in Assembler by a systems programmer for the IBM 360:

RUMCAKE CSECT
* THIS INTRODUCES SOME NEW MNEMONICS
*               MX             MIX
*               MXL            MIX UNTIL LIGHT
*               BSOP           BEAT UNTIL SOFT PEAKS
*               BSTP           BEAT UNTIL STIFF PEAKS
*               BKE            BAKE (SECOND OPERAND IS NUMBER OF MINUTES)
PREHEAT         BALR    12,0   350 DEGREES
                USING   *,12
BOWL1           L               3,FLOUR
                A               3,BAKPOW
                A               3,SALT
                A               3,BSODA
BOWL2           L               4,BUTTER
                MXL             4
                A               4,SUGAR1
                MX              4
                A               4,ORIND
                AR              4,3
                A               4,MIXTURE
                MX              4
                A               4,EXTRACTS
BOWL3           L               5,WHITES
                BSOP            5
                A               5,SUGAR2
                BSTP            5
                AR              5,4
                S               5,PANS
                BKE             PANS,=M'25'
                SVC             3
*
* TYPES OF CONSTANTS ARE ALSO INTRODUCED:
*               T               TEASPOON
                B               TABLESPOON
                C               CUP
*
* NON-INTEGER LENGTHS ARE ALSO INTRODUCED
*
FLOUR           DS              CL2
BAKPOW          DS              TL2             BAKING POWDER
SALT            DS              TL.25
BSODA           DS              TL.25           BAKING SODA
BUTTER          DS              CL.5            NOT MARGARINE
SUGAR1          DS              CL.75           GRANULATED
EGGS            DS              OF
WHITES          DS              HL2
YOLKS           DS              HL2
ORIND           DS              TL1             GRATED ORANGE RIND
MIXTURE         DS              0CL.5
RUM             DS              BL3
OJ              DS              CL.5            ORANGE JUICE
EXTRACTS        DS              0T
ALMOND          DS              TL.25
VANILLA         DS              TL.25
SUGAR2          DS              CL.25
WALNUTS         DS              CL.5
PANS            DC              2C'9INCH'       GREASED AND LINED
                END             RUMCAKE COOL FOR TEN MINUTES, THEN ENJOY

The programmer who sent me this offered a translation:

Here are some definitions I found in an IBM Assembler book, which may help: L = load, A = add, DS = define storage, S = store, SVC = supervisor call (SVC 3 probably means “execute”), AR = add register (AR 5,4 means “add the contents of register 4 to those of register 5 and store the result in register 5”).

Notice that the program never refers to the egg yolks and the walnuts! I fed the egg yolks to my cat, and chopped the walnuts and threw them in at the end.

Rum Cake

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup butter, not margarine
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon grated orange rind
3 tablespoons rum
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9-inch cake pans, and line with waxed paper. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda. In another mixing bowl, cream the butter until light, add the 3/4 cup of sugar and mix well. Add the orange rind to the creamed mixture. Stir the orange juice and rum together, and add to the creamed mixture alternately with the dry ingredients. Add the almond and vanilla extracts and the walnuts. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Add the 1/4 cup of sugar and beat until stiff peaks are formed. Fold the egg whites into the batter, pour into pans and bake for 25 minutes. Cool 10 minutes, then remove from the pans.

Notes: I used the peel from 1 whole orange, and juiced it to get the 1/2 cup of juice. There was no frosting recipe, so I made a half-recipe of this Cream Cheese Icing: cream together 8 ounces of softened cream cheese and 1/2 cup (1 cube) of softened butter of margarine. Sift a 16-ounce box of powdered sugar and add to the creamed mixture. Beat until light. Stir in 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Makes enough icing for a 3-layer cake. (This cake needed only 4 ounces cream cheese, 1/4 cup butter, 8 ounces of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.)

(Thanks, Dorothy.)

| Language · Technology