Is this woman spinning clockwise or counterclockwise?
Pirouette
In a Word
drogulus
n. an entity whose presence is unverifiable because it has no physical effects
A.J. Ayer coined this word spontaneously while describing his “principle of verification” during a 1949 broadcast:
Suppose I say, ‘There’s a drogulus over there’ and you say … ‘What’s a drogulus?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I can’t describe what a drogulus is, because it is not the sort of thing you can see or touch. It has no physical effects of any kind, but it’s a disembodied being.’ And you say, ‘Well, how am I to tell if it’s there or not?’ and I say, ‘There’s no way of telling. Everything’s just the same if it’s there or it’s not there. But the fact is it’s there. There’s a drogulus there standing just behind you.’ Does that make sense?
“Talk about obscure words!” writes lexicographer Norman Schur. “Have we finally met the man who wasn’t there?”
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
— Hughes Mearns
Curiously, Ayer himself seems to have confirmed at least one sighting. In 1959, Lionel Penrose wrote in New Biology, “I had difficulty in finding a suitable name for the activated complexes produced in [certain] experiments. On showing one of them to Professor A. J. Ayer, I inquired whether it perhaps might be a ‘drogulus’ … He replied that it was undoubtedly a ‘drogulus’.”
Charity
Letter to the New York Times, March 26, 1911:
Dear Mr. Editer
i Went down town with my daddy yesterday to see that terrible fire where all the littel girls jumped out of high windows My littel cousin Beatrice and i are sending you five dollars a piece from our savings bank to help them out of trubble please give it to the right one to use it for sombody whose littel girl jumped out of a window i wouldent like to jump out of a high window myself.
Yours Truly,
Morris Butler
Headlights
Wisconsin’s Lorenzo Macauley patented this “improvement in road-lanterns” in 1879, presumably after testing it himself.
A lantern thus attached to a horse’s head enables both horse and driver to see the condition of the track and the objects in it much more plainly and at greater distance than when a lantern is placed on the carriage.
Fair enough.
Departed
F.W.H. Myers, whom spiritualism had converted to belief in a future life, questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what she supposed had become of her soul. The mother replied: ‘Oh, well, I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn’t talk about such unpleasant subjects.’
— Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” 1943
Set Theory
A puzzle by Polish mathematician Paul Vaderlind:
Andre Agassi and Boris Becker are playing tennis. Agassi wins the first set 6-3. If there were 5 service breaks in the set, did Becker serve the first game?
(Service changes with each new game in the 9-game set. A service break is a game won by the non-server.)
Safe and Sound
New York architect Edwin Koch had a brainstorm in 1939 — he proposed a teardrop-shaped “hurricane house” that could rotate like a weather vane. “This amazing dwelling would revolve automatically to face into the oncoming storm, meeting it like the wing of an airplane and passing it smoothly around its curving sides toward its pointed tip,” explained Popular Science.
Electricity would enter through one of the circular tracks on which the house turned, and water and sewage pipes would be connected via swivel joints at the axis of rotation.
Koch had planned the house for hurricane zones, but the swiveling feature could prove useful in any climate: “Merely by selecting the desired push button on a central control board, the entire house may be rotated to face rooms toward or away from the sun or to point bedroom windows toward a cooling breeze.”
Unquote
“I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.” — Francis Bacon
Windfall
One day [A.J. Conant] asked Mr. Lincoln how he became interested in the law. ‘It was Blackstone’s “Commentaries” that did it,’ said Mr. Lincoln, and then he related how he first happened on the books. ‘I was keeping store in New Salem, when one day a man who was migrating to the West drove up with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room in his wagon, and which he said contained nothing of special value. I did not want it, but to oblige him I bought it and paid him, I think, half a dollar. Without further examination I put it away in the store and forgot all about it. Sometime after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel and emptied its contents upon the floor. I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone’s “Commentaries.” I began to read those famous works, and I had plenty of time, for during the long summer days, when the farmers were busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between. The more I read’ — this he said with unusual emphasis — ‘the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them.’ …
— Ida M. Tarbell, Selections From the Letters, Speeches, and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln, 1911
United Nations
Writer Harry Mathews experimented with a bilingual vocabulary he called “legal franglais.” He compiled 425 words that are spelled identically in French and English (aside from accents and capitals). Examples:
Mets attend the sale
Mets attend thé salé
If rogue ignore genes, bride pays
If rogue ignore gênes, bride pays
As mute tint regains miens, touts allege bath
As muté tint regains miens, tout s’allège, bath
If emu ignore bonds, mire jars rogue
If ému ignore bonds, mire jars rogue
Roman delusive gent fit crisper rayon
Roman d’élusive gent fit crisper rayon
Because, ideally, the words should have no meaning in common, it’s hard to find reasonable settings for these utterances. Ian Monk proposed this example:
Il ne faut pas rôtir les oies mais plutôt les mâles de l’espèce, et en grande quantitê.
When it was Fred’s round, he told the landlord to grab their pint glasses and serve him and his three companions forthwith.
SEIZE JARS POUR FOUR.
One can attempt the same thing preserving sound rather than spelling. In Alphonse Allais’ verse, entire lines are pronounced the same:
Par le bois du djinn, où s’entasse de l’effroi,
Parle, bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid.
And, combining these two ideas, one can compose a sentence that looks like French but sounds like English. Stopping before a monkey’s cage, François Le Lionnais exclaimed, “Un singe de beauté est un jouet pour l’hiver!”