THREE NONILLION THIRTEEN TRILLION NINETEEN BILLION contains:
1 B
2 Hs
3 Rs
4 Os
5 Ts
6 Ls
7 Es
8 Is
9 Ns
At least two numbers produce similar results in Spanish:
SEISCIENTOS ONCE NONILLONES SETECIENTOS DIECISEIS
UN OCTODECILLÓN DOSCIENTOS CINCO NONILLONES SEISCIENTOS CINCO
(Thanks, Claudio.)
What’s the worst dictionary in the world? It appears to be Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language: Handy School and Office Edition, published in the late 1970s by Book-Craft Guild, Inc. While on vacation in 1994, Christopher McManus of Silver Spring, Md., had to rely on HSOE to arbitrate word games, and he quickly discovered that it had no entry for cow, die, dig, era, get, hat, law, let, may, new, now, off, old, one, run, see, set, top, two, who, why, or you. In fact, of 1,850 common three- and four-letter words that McManus found listed unanimously in seven other dictionaries, HSOE omitted fully 46 percent. At the same time it included such erudite entries as dhow, gyve, pteridophyte, and quipu.
“To find took, one must know to look under take,” McManus writes, “and disc is listed as a variant only at the disk entry.” The volume includes a captioned illustration of a raft, but no entry for raft!
It’s not clear what happened, but McManus suspects that the book was assembled from blocks of typeset copy, about 40 percent of which disappeared during publication. “Since the erstwhile publisher, Book-Craft Guild, is not listed in current publishing directories, definitive explanations are not available.”
(Christopher McManus, “The World’s Worst Dictionary,” Word Ways, February 1995)
(Note that this doesn’t indict all Webster’s dictionaries — most invoke Webster’s name only for marketing purposes.)
If A=1, B=2, C=3, etc., then ARM + BEND = ELBOW and KING + CHAIR = THRONE.
At the climax of the 1934 film The Black Cat, Boris Karloff recites a “black mass” over a swooning Jacqueline Wells:
Cum grano salis. Fortis cadere cedere non potest. Humanum est errare. Lupis pilum mutat, non mentem. Magna est veritas et praevalebit. Acta exteriora indicant interiora secreta. Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem. Amissum quod nescitur non amittitur. Brutum fulmen. Cum grano salis. Fortis cadere cedere non potest. Fructu, non foliis arborem aestima. Insanus omnes furere credit ceteros. Quem paenitet peccasse paene est innocens.
This sounds marvelous in Karloff’s portentous baritone, but it’s weaker in translation:
With a grain of salt. A brave man may fall, but he cannot yield. To err is human. The wolf may change his skin, but not his nature. Truth is mighty, and will prevail. External actions show internal secrets. Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even. The loss that is not known is no loss at all. Heavy thunder. With a grain of salt. A brave man may fall, but he cannot yield. By fruit, not by leaves, judge a tree. Every madman thinks everybody mad. Who repents from sinning is almost innocent.
He might have added Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina: “Everything sounds more impressive in Latin.”
A German-born resident of Portland, Oregon named Otto Hell was permitted by a local judge to take the name Hall when he pointed out how his neighbors and associates took pleasure in calling him by his surname and the initial of his given name. Another Otto Hell was an optometrist who complained that persons in need of glasses were always being told to ‘go to Hell and see.’
— Robert M. Rennick, “Obscene Names and Naming in Folk Tradition,” in Names and Their Varieties, 1986
Useful German:
The contraceptive pill is the Antibabypille. “I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it,” wrote Mark Twain, “but I talk it best through an interpreter.”
There are only six integers between 1 and 1,000,000 whose English names contain six letters: ELEVEN, TWELVE, TWENTY, THIRTY, EIGHTY, and NINETY.
As it happens, the same is true in Spanish: CUATRO (4), QUINCE (15), VEINTE (20), MIL UNO (1,001), MIL DOS (1,002), and DOS MIL (2,000).
(Thanks, Claudio.)
Think of a number, write down its name, and add up the values of the letters (A=1, B=2, etc.). For example:
4 -> FOUR -> F(6) + O(15) + U(21) + R(18) -> 60
80 is the smallest number that is diminished by this procedure:
80 -> EIGHTY -> E(5) + I(9) + G(7) + H(8) + T(20) + Y(25) -> 74
Curiously, it’s also the smallest such number in Spanish:
80 -> OCHENTA -> O(16) + C(3) + H(8) + E(5) + N(14) + T(21) + A(1) = 68
(Remember that Spanish uses 27 letters, with ñ in the 15th position.)
(Thanks, Claudio.)
After earning a Ph.D. in linguistics, Suzette Haden Elgin invented the language Láadan for a science fiction novel. What makes the language unique is that it’s designed particularly to express the perceptions of women:
One word that has no English equivalent is doroledim, which means “sublimation with food accompanied by guilt about that sublimation”: “Say you have an average woman. She has no control over her life. She has little or nothing in the way of a resource for being good to herself, even when it is necessary. She has family and animals and friends and associates that depend on her for sustenance of all kinds. She rarely has adequate sleep or rest; she has no time for herself, no space of her own, little or no money to buy things for herself, no opportunity to consider her own emotional needs. She is at the beck and call of others, because she has these responsibilities and obligations and does not choose to (or cannot) abandon them. For such a woman, the one and only thing she is likely to have a little control over for indulging her own self is FOOD. When such a woman overeats, the verb for that is ‘doroledim.’ (And then she feels guilty, because there are women whose children are starving and who do not have even THAT option for self-indulgence …)”
A full dictionary is here.
In 1930 linguistic psychologist Charles K. Ogden offered the world Basic English, an international language that stripped conventional English down to 850 words:
Seven and eighty years have gone by from the day when our fathers gave to this land a new nation — a nation which came to birth in the thought that all men are free, a nation given up to the idea that all men are equal.
The movement reached its greatest popularity shortly after World War II, when Ogden promoted it in support of world peace; Winston Churchill thought it might promote an empire of the pen rather than the sword. But FDR pointed out that his friend’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” would be reduced to “blood, work, eye water, and face water” in the language’s ruthlessly simplified vocabulary, and in 1945 the BBC suggested that Basic English be left “on a high shelf in a dark corner.” Ogden passed away 12 years later.