The Perfect Infinitive

“Let us take a typical case. A gentleman and his wife, calling on friends, find them not at home. The gentleman decides to leave a note of regret couched in a few well-chosen words, and the first thing he knows he is involved in this:

We would have liked to have found you in.

“Reading it over, the gentleman is assailed by the suspicion that he has too many ‘haves,’ and that the whole business has somehow been put too far into the past. … He takes an envelope out of his pocket and grimly makes a list of all the possible combinations, thus getting:”

  • We would have liked to have found
  • We would have liked to find
  • We would like to have found
  • We would like to find
  • We had hoped to have been able to have found

“If he has married the right kind of woman, she will hastily scratch a brief word on a calling card, shove it under the door, and drag her husband away.”

— James Thurber, “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage,” 1931

| Language

Piecework

In his Canterbury Puzzles of 1907, Henry Dudeney posed a now-famous challenge: How can you cut an equilateral triangle into four pieces that can be reassembled to form a perfect square?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Triangledissection.svg

Dudeney’s beautiful solution was accompanied by a rather involved geometric derivation. It seems unlikely that he worked this out laboriously in approaching an answer to the problem, but how then did he reach it?

Here’s one possibility: If a strip of squares is draped adroitly over a strip of triangles, their intersection forms a wordless proof of the task’s feasibility:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haberdasher_strips.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Whether that was Dudeney’s path to the solution is not known, but it appears at least plausible.

| Puzzles · Science & Math

And They’re Off

Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:

  • Bates Motel
  • Disco Inferno
  • Up Your Assets
  • Race Horse
  • Crashing Bore
  • English Muffin
  • Leo Pity Me
  • Cold Shower
  • T.V. Doubletalk
  • Ranikaboo
  • Holy Cats
  • Hadn’t Orter
  • Strong Strong
  • Honeybunny Boo

After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”

This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end:

| Language

Fare

The recipe for “Groper, Head and Shoulders Boiled” in Mrs. Beeton’s Everyday Cookery (1923) concludes with the warning “Great care should be taken of the immense gelatinous lips, as these are considered the best part.” In 1948 New Statesman challenged its readers to invent a recipe with a more disgusting last line. L.G. Udall obliged:

GRILLED GORILLA’S FOOT

One foot will suffice for each person.

First shave the upper part of the foot and wash in warm water. With a gimlet (for preference as the skin is very hard) bore a number of holes through the thick skin of the under part of the foot. Grease liberally with lard. Grill slowly for about twenty minutes with the under surface downwards. Then turn the foot over and continue to grill steadily. From time to time place a fork on the foot. When it is quite done it will be found that the toes will curl up firmly over the fork, so that it can be lifted up and put on a hot plate. Leave the fork in the toes and serve immediately.

The other winners are here.

| Humor

Elevated Thoughts

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montaigne_1576_R.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The joists in the tower in which Montaigne wrote his Essays are inscribed with his favorite quotations from Greek and Latin authors, many of which appear in his writings: “It is not so much things that torment man, as the opinions he has of things.” “Every reasoning has its contrary.” “Wind swells bladders, opinion swells men.”

He wrote, “The room pleases me because it is somewhat difficult of access, and retired, as much on account of the utility of the exercise, as because I there avoid the crowd. Here is my seat, my place, my rest. I try to make it purely my own, and to free this single corner from conjugal, filial, and civil community.”

The numbers in the diagram below correspond to this table in the German Wikipedia. English translations are here.

In large Latin letters on the central rafter are the words “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. I PAUSE. I EXAMINE.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Montaigne_-_tower_-_sketch_of_2nd_floor_with_library.svg
Image: © Roman Eisele / CC BY-SA 4.0
| Literature · Quotations

Adages

Aphorisms from Norman Macdonald’s Maxims and Moral Reflections, 1827:

  • By speaking contemptibly of our enemies, we disgrace our own hostility.
  • We would be successful in most enterprises of life, were we to take that advice to ourselves which we give to others in similar circumstances.
  • Severity of punishment deters minor crimes, but renders greater ones more certain and determined.
  • Pride, like love, is sure to discover itself; because it can only derive value from the success with which it affects others.
  • Were there no fools there would be no flatterers.
  • The less we know of ourselves, the worse qualified we are to judge correctly of others.
  • No end can be honorable that is dishonorably obtained.
  • The better a man is known to himself, the more easily he is understood by others.
  • There are two sorts of people that are never contented: they that do not know what they desire, and they that attempt impossibilities.
  • The failure of many designs is owing to a confidence of success.
  • A sure way, sometimes, to expose our virtue, is to endeavor to conceal it.
  • A man is more deserving of success, that claims not adulation as his first conquest.
  • We advise others better than ourselves.
  • Most men have two principles, one practical, another professional.
  • In cunning, our pride oftener dreads disappointment than our interest.

“Most men know how to take offence; but few know how to forgive — pride is always impatient; magnanimity, tolerant and pacific.”

| Quotations

“A Credit to the GPO”

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZZAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA719

‘I send you a post card which was delivered safely the day after it was posted. I think the address reflects credit on both the ingenuity of the sender and the cleverness of the Post Office officials.’ — A Folkestone Correspondent

(From Strand, December 1903.) (Click to enlarge.)

UPDATE: A number of readers have asked for the solution. The Strand gives none, and perhaps had none, but a diligent postal worker who viewed the envelope edge-on would have discovered that the circle is composed of four overlapping sets of letters, offset from one another by 45 degrees and each so tall and narrow as to be otherwise unreadable. When they’re viewed at an angle, perspective condenses the letters into four phrases:

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZZAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA719

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZZAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA719

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZZAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA719

https://books.google.com/books?id=SZZAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA719

By my best reading, the address is C.H. BRUCE, ESQR, EARLS AVENUE, FOLKESTONE, ENGLAND.

| Oddities