Search Results for: in a word

Caesura

On the afternoon of June 28, 1914, Stefan Zweig was on holiday in Baden, reading an essay in the Kurpark, while

the wind in the trees, the twittering of the birds and the music floating across from the park were at the same time part of my consciousness. I could clearly hear the melodies without being distracted, for the ear is so adaptable that a continuous noise, a roaring street, a rushing stream are quickly assimilated into one’s awareness; only an unexpected pause in the rhythm makes us prick our ears … Suddenly the music stopped in the middle of a bar. I didn’t know what piece they had played. I just sensed that the music had suddenly stopped. Instinctively, I looked up from my book. The crowd, too, which was strolling through the trees in a single flowing mass, seemed to change; it, too, paused abruptly in its motion to and fro. Something must have happened.

Word had just arrived that the archduke of Austria had been assassinated in Sarajevo.

(Quoted in Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 2013.)

| History

Wallflower

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20170618_3678_Masai_Mara_Touraco_masque.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Marked by its face and call, the turaco Crinifer personatus of East Africa is known as the bare-faced go-away bird.

This seems unfair. Hummingbirds get names such as royal sunangel, empress brilliant, blue-chinned sapphire, golden-crowned emerald, and shining sunbeam.

“One tends not to want to devote much energy to tracking down birds with names such as the unadorned flycatcher, drab water-tyrant, grayish mourner or one-colored becard,” writes birder William Young. “In Costa Rica, I saw a tiny (albeit friendly) drab bird with the oxymoronic name of paltry tyrannulet.”

(William Young, “Words of a Feather,” Word Ways 32:4 [November 1999], 297-299.)

| Language

Right Enough

The weather was unprecedented — weeks of damp and rain and fog. Everybody talked about it. One day during that spell I was holding forth to a practical farmer on the subject of hay. Full of book learning, I was explaining (rather too glibly) the advantages of cutting hay in June. I described in detail the vitamin loss incurred by letting hay stand in the field after it has matured, and how much greater the feed value was per unit weight in early-cut hay, even though the quantity might be slightly less. The farmer was a quiet man, with big hands for curling round a scythe handle. He listened attentively. My words swirled around his head like summer flies. Finally, when I had exhausted my little store of learning and paused for a moment, he ventured a reply.

‘The time to cut hay,’ he said firmly, ‘is in hayin’ time.’

— E.B. White, “Book Learning,” 1942

| Society

Lexicon

Words that don’t exist but ought to, proposed by Gelett Burgess in Burgess Unabridged (1914):

cowcat: an unimportant guest, an insignificant personality
critch: to array oneself in uncomfortable splendor
edicle: one who is educated beyond his intellect, a pedant
fidgeltick: food that is a bore to eat
flooijab: an apparent compliment with a concealed sting
gloogo: foolishly faithful without reward
gorgule: a splendiferous, over-ornate object or gift
gowyop: a perplexity wherein familiar things seem strange
jip: a dangerous subject of conversation
lallify: to prolong a story tiresomely, or repeat a joke
leolump: an interrupter of conversations
oofle: a person whose name one cannot remember
paloodle: to give unnecessary advice
pooje: a regrettable discovery
spillix: accidental good luck
tashivation: the art of answering without listening to questions
uglet: an unpleasant duty too long postponed
vorge: voluntary suffering, unnecessary effort or exercise
xenogore: an interloper who keeps one from interesting things
yamnoy: a bulky, unmanageable object to be carried
yowf: one whose importance exceeds his merit

Interestingly, we owe the word blurb to Burgess — he invented it in 1906 for his book Are You a Bromide?, and it proved so useful that we’re still using it more than a century later.

| Language

The Unexpected Gift

In one variation of a popular paradox, a friend tells you that she’ll give you a present sometime next week, but that you won’t be able to predict the day on which you’ll receive it.

This is puzzling. If she waits until Saturday, the end of the week, it will be obvious that you must receive the gift on that day, as no other day remains possible. But if we exclude Saturday then the same argument could be used to exclude Friday, and so on back to Sunday. It seems that the friend’s declaration can’t be true — her gift can’t be unexpected.

David Morice offers one possibility that he called “Zeno’s solution”: Your friend, wearing a precision wristwatch, presents the gift in the moment precisely between Friday and Saturday. No reasoning has led you to expect this, so you’re surprised.

(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 27:2 [May 1994], 106-116.) (See the link — Morice offers three other solutions as well, “but I expect that each is logically flawed.”)

| Oddities

Twice True

Each of these sums is valid in two ways, once when the words at taken at their face value and again when each letter is interpreted as a particular digit:

   THREE    79322           ONE       483       ZERO   4206      TRECE  69858
    NINE     6562          FIVE      7293        SEI    827      CINCO  57354
     TEN      726           TEN       138      SETTE  82112       OCHO   4504
FOURTEEN 40837226        ELEVEN    363938       OTTO   6116       ----   ----
 FIFTEEN  4547226      NINETEEN  82831338       NOVE   9652     QUINCE 127358
 -------  -------     FORTYFIVE 745107293       ----   ----       ONCE   4358
FIFTYONE 45471062     --------- ---------     TRENTA 102913
                      NINETYONE 828310483

All are from the Journal of Recreational Mathematics, collected by Leonard Gordon in “Doubly-True Alphametics,” Word Ways 27:1 [February 1994], 10-12. More alphametics.

| Language · Science & Math

All Relative

In a position puzzle, a phrase is meant to be inferred from the position of words on a page. A familiar example is

stand   take    to     takings.
  I     you    throw      my

This can be read “I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertakings.”

“Sometimes the difficulty is increased by using letters and making them suggest words,” noted Household Words in 1882. It offered this example, adding, “This requires some little thought”:

https://books.google.com/books?id=sjQ-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA519

What does it say?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Dunbar’s Number

In the 1990s, after studying the relation between primate brain size and social groups, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that human beings can comfortably maintain about 150 stable relationships — relationships in which one knows all the other members and how they relate to one another. Informally, he said, this is “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

Notably, in a 2018 article for the Financial Times, Dunbar added that we maintain an inner core of about five people with whom we spend about 40 percent of our social time and 10 more with whom we spend another 20 percent. “In other words, about two-thirds of our total social effort is devoted to just 15 people.”

| Science & Math · Society

Ethic

Joining an Inuit hunting party in Greenland in 1910, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen was pleased to receive several hundred pounds of meat because he’d thrust a harpoon into a walrus. When he thanked the primary hunter, the man looked at him and said nothing. Back at camp he told Freuchen:

Up in our country we are human! And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. If I get something today you may get it tomorrow. Some men never kill anything because they are seldom lucky or they may not be able to run or row as fast as others. Therefore they would feel unhappy to have to be thankful to their fellows all the time. And it would not be fun for the big hunter to feel that other men were constantly humbled by him. Then his pleasure would die. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves, and by whips one makes dogs.

Freuchen wrote, “I have come to understand the truth of his words. The polar Eskimos were a free people when we met them.”

(Peter Freuchen, Adventures in the Arctic, 1960.)

| Society

Recombination

Harry Mathews assembled lines from 14 existing sonnets to make a new one:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field?
Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang?
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time:
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn
Even such a beauty as you master now.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
(When other petty griefs have done their spite,
And heavily) from woe to woe tell o’er
That Time will come and take my love away;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
As any she belied beyond compare.

“This new poem sheds light on the structure and movement of the Shakespearean sonnet,” he wrote. “Nothing any longer can be taken for granted; every word has become a banana peel.”

(Harry Mathews, “Mathews’s Algorithm,” in Warren F. Motte, ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, 1998.)

| Poems · Science & Math