A problem from Crux Mathematicorum, April 2006:
A group of people must be formed into committees. Show that the number of possible committees that can be formed with an odd number of members is the same as the number that can be formed with an even number of members. (Assume that a committee with no members and one that includes everyone are both allowed.)
Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for good writing:
“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Obscure words from Paul Hellweg’s Insomniac’s Dictionary, 1989:
tomecide: the destruction of a book
lampadomancy: augury by torch flame
shotclog: a drinking companion tolerated because he pays for the drinks
allonym: the name of a real person borrowed by an author
ephelides: freckles
feuterer: someone who keeps a dog
hypnopedia: the process of learning while asleep (e.g. by listening to a recording)
girouettism: the practice of frequently altering personal opinions to follow popular trends
panchreston: a broadly inclusive thesis that purports to cover all aspects of its subject but usually ends up as an unacceptable oversimplification
grangousier: one who will swallow anything
A few facetious Latinisms collected by Michael Quinion:
ferroequinologist: a railroad enthusiast (“one who studies the iron horse”)
infracaninophile: a lover of the underdog
anti-fogmatic: an alcoholic drink that counteracts the effects of fog
In 2014 a Futility Closet reader led me to elephantocetomachia, “a fight between an elephant and a whale,” a valuable word assembled from spare parts. And my notes say that vacansopapurosophobia means “fear of blank paper” — a useful expression, even if it’s not in the dictionary.
Here are two 16th-century German portraits of seated ladies wearing hats, shown in three-quarter view. The one on the left was painted by Hans Holbein, the one on the right by the lesser-known Hans Krell. A panel of 12 specialists agreed that the Holbein painting had more artistic merit, and subjects who said they were familiar with art agreed with them. But individuals with no art expertise often chose the “wrong” painting, the Krell. This would suggest that people’s judgment in art is shaped by their expertise.
But Holbein is also much more famous than Krell, and this factor is likely to influence judgments too. How important is it? That’s not clear.
“Only if we can show that art experts across cultures agree on the comparative aesthetic merit of works they have never seen before and never heard of can we conclude there is consensus independent of cultural learning,” notes Boston College psychologist Ellen Winner. “This kind of study has not been done.”
(Ellen Winner, How Art Works, 2018.)
A golfer takes a swing at a golf ball. Fortunately it’s a good shot, and the ball heads for the cup. Unfortunately, a squirrel, rather dangerously positioned near the cup, kicks the ball away, thus decreasing the ball’s chance of landing in the cup. Fortunately, the ball then hits the branch of a nearby tree and is deflected into the cup.
“Question: was the squirrel’s kick a cause of the hole-in-one?” asks Australian National University philosopher Helen Beebee. “According to some philosophers’ intuitions, the answer is yes. According to others, the answer is no: the ball went in despite the kick. According to a third view, the kick was a cause of the hole-in-one and the hole-in-one occurred despite the kick.” Who’s right?
(Helen Beebee, “Do Causes Raise the Chances of Effects?”, Analysis 58:3 [July 1998], 182-190. The original example is due to Deborah A. Rosen.)
Articles observed by the crew of Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts (1682-1722):
That’s from Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), via naval historian David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag (1995). In the early years of the 18th century, Cordingly writes, a pirate captain “had absolute power in battle and when ‘fighting, chasing, or being chased,’ but in all other matters he was governed by the majority wishes of the crew.”
In a 1993 segment on National Public Radio, Will Shortz challenged listeners to construct sentences that use only two consonants, such as “Can Connie, a nice niece in Canaan, can-can on a canoe in uncanny innocence?”
The winner, sent in by Dawne Bear and Rachel Chanin, was “See Tess taste-test Sissy’s sassy tea to attest to its tastiest status.” Other entries:
In presenting these in Word Ways the following May, editor Ross Eckler noted that “No one discovered that palindromes sometimes work: too hot to hoot; Madam, I’m Adam; name no one man.”
This shepherd thought poetic thoughts
As by the flocks he sat;
But while he wrote his verses,
The goat fed on his hat.
Children’s author and illustrator Peter Newell collected a whole series of such reversible images in Topsys and Turvys (1893) and a sequel. He followed these up with The Hole Book (1908), in which young Tom Potts accidentally fires a gun, sending a bullet through a town; The Slant Book (1910), a book shaped like a rhombus in which a runaway baby carriage careens downhill; and The Rocket Book (1912), in which a janitor’s son sends a rocket upward through 21 successive floors of an apartment building.
The Hole Book was manufactured with a hole right through it — on each page the physical hole shows the mayhem caused by the bullet, deflating bagpipes, severing kite strings, sounding a bass drum, and blowing up a car, among many other things. It’s finally stopped by a cake:
And this was lucky for Tom Potts,
The boy who fired the shot —
It might have gone clean round the world
And killed him on the spot.
During World War I, British physicist G.I. Taylor was asked to design a dart to be dropped onto enemy troops from the air. He and a colleague dropped a bundle of darts as a trial and then “went over the field and pushed a square of paper over every dart we could find sticking out of the ground.”
When we had gone over the field in this way and were looking at the distribution, a cavalry officer came up and asked us what we were doing. When we explained that the darts had been dropped from an airplane, he looked at them and, seeing a dart piercing every sheet remarked: ‘If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would never have believed it possible to make such good shooting from the air.’
(The darts were never used — “we were told they were regarded as inhuman weapons and could not be used by gentlemen.”)
(From T.W. Körner, The Pleasures of Counting, 1996.)
Modern lighting is so ubiquitous that we scarcely think about it, but from prehistory to A.D. 1782 there were just a few primitive means to banish the dark, chiefly fires, rushlights, and tallow candles. And even these were rather precious — in the 17th century John Aubrey wrote of William Oughtred that “his wife was a penurious woman and would not allow him to burne candle after supper, by which means many a good notion is lost.” In 1763 James Boswell was midway through a night of writing when disaster struck:
About two o’clock in the morning I inadvertently snuffed out my candle, and as my fire before that was long before black and cold, I was in a great dilemma how to proceed. Downstairs did I softly and silently step to the kitchen. But, alas, there was as little fire there as upon the icy mountains of Greenland. With a tinder box is a light struck every morning to kindle the fire, which is put out at night. But this tinder box I could not see, nor knew where to find. I was now filled with gloomy ideas of the terrors of the night. I was also apprehensive that my landlord who always keeps a pair of loaded pistols by him, might fire at me as a thief.
What did he do? “I went up to my room, sat quietly until I heard the watchman calling ‘past three o’clock’. I then called to him to knock at the door of the house where I lodged. He did so, and I opened to him and got my candle re-lumed without danger. Thus was I relieved and continued busy until eight the next day.”
(William T. O’Dea, The Social History of Lighting, 1958.)