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Better Safe

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brand_De_Rijp1_WEB.jpg

The word curfew derives from the Old French phrase couvre-feu, which means “cover fire.” Under a law imposed by William the Conqueror, all lights and fires had to be covered by 8 p.m. to reduce the risk of conflagration in towns still built largely of timber.

The practice spread through medieval Europe. Writes historian Roger Ekirch, “Not only were streets swept of pedestrians, but homes still aglow after the curfew bell ran afoul of authorities. Besides incurring fines, offenders faced the risk of incarceration, especially if caught outdoors.”

(At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, 2006.)

| History · Language

Do It Yourself

That wise philosopher, William J. Boardman, tells me that those first threatening aggressive noises [man’s first swearing] were full of G’s and K’s and P’s and H’s and harsh sibilants. Such noises had the effect of a blow; they needed no dictionary to prove they were primed with all the bad magic of an evil wish. …

If I am to take seriously Mr. Boardman’s assertion that only a certain five letters have objurgatory value, then why not make words out of them and consider them as much our own private property as ‘jobjam’ belonged to Booth Tarkington, or ‘Malaga!’ to Dumas? Try ‘Bodkogh!’ for instance, or ‘Hagbadek!’ ‘Khigbod!’ ‘Dakadigbeg!’ or ‘Godbekho!’

— Burges Johnson, The Lost Art of Profanity, 1948

| Language

Agreed

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xoras1.jpg

Another example of Horace Greeley’s terrible handwriting: According to biographer Lurton Dunham Ingersoll, in 1870 the town of Sandwich, Illinois, invited Greeley to address its lecture association. He responded:

Dear Sir. — I am overworked and growing old. I shall be 60 next Feb. 3. On the whole, it seems I must decline to lecture henceforth, except in this immediate vicinity, if I do at all. I cannot promise to visit Illinois on that errand — certainly not now.

The town replied:

Dear Sir. — Your acceptance to lecture before our association next winter came to hand this morning. Your penmanship not being the plainest, it took some time to translate it; but we succeeded; and would say your time ‘3d of February,’ and terms ‘$60,’ are entirely satisfactory.

They added, “As you suggest, we may be able to get you other engagements in this immediate vicinity; if so, we will advise you.”

| History

Efficient

In a friendly competition with linguist Richard Lederer in 1990, Bruce Monrad, a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., produced an 11-word “supersentence” — “a single sentence that includes one example of each of the four phrases and three subordinate clauses that are identified in English grammar. These are: prepositional phrase, participial phrase, gerund phrase, infinitive phrase, adverb clause, adjective clause, and noun clause”:

Whoever rebels, daring oppose by fighting when oppressed, which overcomes, conquers.

Dave Morice labels the parts here. Lederer notes that the adjective clause, “which overcomes,” is a dangling modifier. “Still, I have never been able to improve on Bruce’s effort.”

(Richard Lederer, “The Glamour of Grammar,” Verbatim 16:4 [Spring 1990], 5-6.)

| Language

Elocution

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An odd little detail: David Garrick said of Anglican evangelist George Whitefield that he “could make his audience weep or tremble merely by varying his pronunciation of the word ‘Mesopotamia.'”

“Garrick did not say that he had ever seen this feat performed,” noted one biographer. “[H]e surely must have been befooling some too warm admirer of the preacher, to see how much he could believe.”

But Garrick also said, “I would give a hundred guineas if I could only say ‘Oh’ like Mr. Whitefield.”

| Religion

Turns of Phrase

Erasmus’ 1512 rhetoric textbook Copia lists 195 variations on the sentence “Your letter delighted me greatly”:

Your brief note refreshed my spirits in no small measure.
I was in no small measure refreshed in spirit by your grace’s hand.
From your affectionate letter I received unbelievable pleasure.
Your pages engendered in me an unfamiliar delight.
I conceived a wonderful delight from your pages.
Your lines conveyed to me the greatest joy.
The greatest joy was brought to me by your lines.
We derived great delight from your excellency’s letter.
From my dear Faustus’ letter I derived much delight.
In these Faustine letters I found a wonderful kind of delectation.
At your words a delight of no ordinary kind came over me.
I was singularly delighted by your epistle.
To be sure your letter delighted my spirits!
Your brief missive flooded me with inexpressible Joy.
As a result of your letter, I was suffused by an unfamiliar gladness.
Your communication poured vials of joy on my head.
Your epistle afforded me no small delight.
The perusal of your letter charmed my mind with singular delight.

He followed this with 200 variations on the phrase “Always, as long as I live, I shall remember you.”

| Language · Literature

All’s Fair

https://bibliophilly.library.upenn.edu/viewer.php?id=Oversize%20Ms.%20Codex%20109#page/276/mode/2up

The Feuer Buech, a 1584 treatise on munitions by Franz Helm, contains a startling illustration: a cat and a bird approaching a town, each bearing a lighted explosive.

The image accompanies a section titled “To set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise”; Penn curator Mitch Fraas translates the relevant section:

Create a small sack like a fire-arrow … if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.

Fortunately it appears this was never carried into practice … though possibly birds have been used for this purpose in Russia.

| Oddities

Shop Talk

https://archive.org/details/sim_strand-magazine_january-june-1895_9/page/50/mode/2up

An odd little item from the New Zealand Police Gazette, Sept. 20, 1893:

Christchurch. — William Strange and Co. report that between the 2nd and 4th instant their premises were broken into, and a determined but unsuccessful attempt made to break open the safe, the words ‘No time and little room; bad luck’ being written thereon with a piece of candle by the offenders. Nothing stolen.

The Strand reported that the photograph was “taken by a burglar, and subsequently sent to the makers of the safe that resisted his efforts.”

| Crime

Chronological Order

By Lee Sallows: If the letters BJFGSDNRMLATPHOCIYVEU are assigned to the integers -10 to 10, then:

J+A+N+U+A+R+Y     = -9+0-4+10+0-3+7     =  1
F+E+B+R+U+A+R+Y   = -8+9-10-3+10+0-3+7  =  2
M+A+R+C+H         = -2+0-3+5+3          =  3
A+P+R+I+L         = 0+2-3+6-1           =  4
M+A+Y             = -2+0+7              =  5
J+U+N+E           = -9+10-4+9           =  6
J+U+L+Y           = -9+10-1+7           =  7
A+U+G+U+S+T       = 0+10-7+10-6+1       =  8
S+E+P+T+E+M+B+E+R = -6+9+2+1+9-2-10+9-3 =  9
O+C+T+O+B+ER      = 4+5+1+4-10+9-3      = 10
N+O+V+E+M+B+E+R   = -4+4+8+9-2-10+9-3   = 11
D+E+C+E+M+B+E+R   = -5+9+5+9-2-10+9-3   = 12

Similarly, if -7 to 7 are assigned SROEMUNFIDYHTAW, then SUNDAY to SATURDAY take on ordinal values. See Alignment.

(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 24:2 [May 1991], 105-116.)

| Science & Math

Kürschák’s Tile

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:K%C3%BCrsch%C3%A1k%27s_tile.svg

Hungarian mathematician József Kürschák offered this “proof without words” that a regular dodecagon inscribed in a unit circle has area 3. If the circle is inscribed in a square, the resulting figure can be tiled by triangles of two families — 16 equilateral triangles whose sides are equal to those of the dodecagon and 32 isosceles triangles with angles 15°-15°-150° and longest side 1. The area of the large square is 4, and the triangles that make up the dodecagon can be rearranged to fill 3 of its quadrants (see the video below). So the area of the dodecagon is 3/4 of 4, or 3.

(To see that the square and the dodecagon can be tiled as claimed, see Alexander Bogomolny’s discussion here.)

(Gerald L. Alexanderson and Kenneth Seydel, “Kürschak’s Tile,” Mathematical Gazette 62:421 [October 1978], 192-196.)

| Science & Math