Body Politic

When British politician Michael Foot was put in charge of a nuclear disarmament committee in 1986, London Times subeditor Martyn Cornell came up with the headline FOOT HEADS ARMS BODY.

“I certainly wasn’t going to get ‘nuclear’ or ‘disarmament’ or ‘committee’ to fit,” he said. “To my astonishment, the headline was printed.”

Andrew Kyle later pointed out that if Foot had become prime minister and discovered that his defense secretary had approved the strongarm tactics of the National Front, the headline might have read FOOT KNOWS ARMS BODY HEAD BACKS FRONT MUSCLE.

| Language

Detente

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Churchill_portrait_NYP_45063.jpg

In 1958 Winston Churchill broke his spine in a fall and was required to sleep with a bedrest, which he hated. He and nurse Roy Howells got into a heated argument in which the two swore at one another.

In making up afterward, Churchill said, “You were very rude to me, you know.”

Howells said, “Yes, but you were rude too.”

Churchill said, “Yes, but I am a great man.”

“There was no answer to that,” Howells remembered later. “He knew, as I and the rest of the world knew, that he was right.”

(From John Perry, Winston Churchill, 2010.)

| History

Wallflower

In 1989 a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected an unusually high-pitched whale call in the Pacific. Where most whales sing in the range 15–20 hertz, this one sang at 52 hertz, just above the lowest note of a tuba. The song has recurred most years since then, ranging between Alaska and California but not following the migration pattern of any known filter feeder. The whale seems to be healthy and maturing, but it remains the only one of its kind.

Because it sings and travels alone, the animal has been called “the loneliest whale in the world.” Whale biologists suspect that it may be malformed, or possibly a hybrid of two different species.

“He’s saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here,'” Kate Stafford of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory told the New York Times in 2004. “Well, nobody is phoning home.”

(Thanks, Kendal.)

| Oddities

Bestial Passion

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gorilla_2_(PSF).png

In 1993 Jacques Jouet wrote a love poem in the language of the great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Zor hoden tanda
Kagoda bolgani
Rak gom tand-panda
Yato kalan mangani
Kreegh-ah yel greeh-ah
Kreegh-ah zu-vo bolgani
Greeh-ah tand-popo
Ubor zee kalan mangani.

Where are you going, gorilla,
In the dark forest?
You run without a sound
Seeking the female ape.
Beware of love
Watch out, gorilla
A lover dies of hunger
Of thirst, of hoping for the leg of the female great ape.

“The great-ape language has the peculiarity of being composed of a lexicon of less than 300 words,” Jouet notes. “In the absence of any information, it must be deemed that the syntax is according to the user’s preference, as are the pronunciation and prosody.”

(From Raymond Queneau’s Oulipo Laboratory, 1995.)

| Language · Poems

In a Word

nudiustertian
adj. of the day before yesterday

ereyesterday
adv. on the day before yesterday

yestreen
n. yesterday evening

yester-afternoon
adv. yesterday afternoon

yesternoon
n. yesterday at noon

pridian
adj. of or relating to the previous day

yestern
adj. of yesterday

hesternal
adj. of yesterday

yesternight
adv. last night

hodiernal
adj. of or belonging to the present day

overmorrow
adv. on the day after tomorrow

| Language

Round Numbers

Every now and again one comes across an astounding result that closely relates two foreign objects which seem to have nothing in common. Who would suspect, for example, that on the average, the number of ways of expressing a positive integer n as a sum of two integral squares, x2 + y2 = n, is π?

— Ross Honsberger, Mathematical Gems III, 1977

| Science & Math

Princess Caraboo

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illustration_facing_page_36,_Devonshire_Characters_and_Strange_Events.png

In April 1817 a strange young woman appeared in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire. She was 5 foot 2, with black hair and eyes, and wore a black shawl twisted like a turban around her head and a black dress with a muslin frill. She presented herself at a cottage in the village and pointed to the couch. The cottager, struck that she did not seem to understand him, summoned help, and she was sent to the county magistrate.

The woman spoke an unfamiliar tongue and looked blankly at those who spoke English. At first she sought to sleep on the floor, apparently not understanding what beds were for. The next morning the parish clergyman showed her a series of books and divined that she had come from China aboard a ship. She seemed to call herself Caraboo.

In the weeks that followed she taught her new friends the strange language that she spoke and wrote, and through it gave her story: She was a princess from an island named Javasu, and had been captured by pirates while walking in her garden. The pirates had sold her to the captain of a brig in exchange for a sack of gold dust. After some ill treatment, she jumped overboard and swam to the nearest shore, which happened to be England.

Throughout this time Caraboo exhibited strange behavior, wandering abroad with a gong, a tambourine, and a bow and arrow. She climbed trees dextrously and swam like a fish; she fenced capably and danced a peculiar sort of waltz.

Eventually a local scientist named Wilkinson published several letters in the Bath Chronicle hoping that someone might recognize a description of the strange woman. A woman named Mrs. Neale responded, and the truth came out. Princess Caraboo was Mary Baker, the daughter of a cobbler in Devonshire. She had wanted five pounds to pay passage to Philadephia on an emigrant ship, and had decided to beg for it while posing as a foreigner.

The magistrate’s wife forgave her and paid for her passage. She returned seven years later and tried to earn a living by exhibiting herself in her old guise, but few people came. She ended her days selling leeches in Bristol drugstores.

| Hoaxes

Water Bed

http://www.google.com/patents/US299951

Edward Brown’s ill-considered “hammock canoe,” patented in 1884, can be suspended between trees like a conventional hammock or launched on a river like a bottomless aquatic coffin:

On the sides of the main structure or frame handles or holding means are provided, by means of which the person using the device can support the same while walking or floating with their body protruding through the opening in the netting or floor of the float. In addition to the handles I can employ a strap or band adapted to pass over the shoulders of the person using the device.

It’s not clear to me how someone can walk, float, lie, stand, and carry a boat at the same time. Perhaps I should get one and try it out.

| Technology