Arthur and Robert are identical twins. One always lies, and the other always tells the truth, but you don’t know which is the liar. One day you meet one of them and want to find out whether it’s Arthur or Robert. But you can ask only one yes/no question, and the question can’t contain more than three words. What question will do? Alternatively, suppose you want to find out whether it’s Arthur or Robert who’s truthful. What three-word yes/no question will reveal the answer?
Search Results for: in a word
Who’s Who
John Bevis’ 2010 book Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds collects the nonsense words that birders have invented to try to convey bird calls and songs:
ag ag ag ag arr: fulmar
beesh: scaled quail
bek bek bek: red-throated loon
chack-weet weet-chack: northern wheater
djadjadja: twite
ee woomp: bittern
hup-hup-a-hwooo: red-billed pigeon
kakakowlp-kowlp: yellow-billed cuckoo
kuk-kuk-cow-cow-cow-cowp-cowp: pied-billed grebe
quickquickquickquick: cuckoo
seedle seedle seedle chup chup: hermit warbler
tiutiu-tiutiutiuk-swee: yellowhammer
trrrrk: wrentit
tzew-zuppity-zuppity-zup: rufous hummingbird
weeta weeta weeta che che che: Lucy’s warbler
wheet-tsack-tsack-tsack: stonechat
zeeda-zeeda-zeeda-sissi-peeso: goldcrest
zoo zee zoo zoo zee: black-throated green warbler
Other interpreters have used actual words — the white-eyed vireo says, “Pick up the beer check quick!”
Al Fresco
In 1848 the French commune of Le Plessis-Piquet distinguished itself with a restaurant built in the boughs of a chestnut tree. Owner Joseph Gueusquin named it Le Grand Robinson, after the treehouse in Swiss Family Robinson.
“Word spread and people started to make the eight-mile pilgrimage from Paris,” writes Pete Nelson in Treehouses of the World. “Soon, other entrepreneurs began opening their own treehouse restaurants. At the height of its popularity, there were ten such restaurants and countless other treehouse attractions.”
The trend persisted even into the 1960s, drawing a steady stream of curious diners to Le Plessis-Piquet — in fact, in 1909 the commune officially changed its name to Le Plessis-Robinson, after Gueusquin’s pioneering idea.
Small World
As children Maurice Baring and his brother Hugo invented a gibberish language in which the word for yes was Sheepartee and the word for no was Quiliquinino. This grew so tiresome to the adults around them that they were eventually threatened with a whipping:
The language stopped, but a game grew out of it, which was most complicated, and lasted for years even after we went to school. The game was called ‘Spankaboo.’ It consisted of telling and acting the story of an imaginary continent in which we knew the countries, the towns, the government, and the leading people. These countries were generally at war with one another. Lady Spankaboo was a prominent lady at the Court of Doodahn. She was a charming character, not beautiful nor clever, and sometimes a little bit foolish, but most good-natured and easily taken in. Her husband, Lord Spankaboo, was a country gentleman, and they had no children. She wore red velvet in the evening, and she was bien vue at Court.
There were hundreds of characters in the game. They increased as the story grew. It could be played out of doors, where all the larger trees in the garden were forts belonging to the various countries, or indoors, but it was chiefly played in the garden, or after we went to bed. Then Hugo would say: ‘Let’s play Spankaboo,’ and I would go straight on with the latest events, interrupting the narrative every now and then by saying: ‘Now, you be Lady Spankaboo,’ or whoever the character on the stage might be for the moment, ‘and I’ll be So-and-so.’
“Everything that happened to us and everything we read was brought into the game — history, geography, the ancient Romans, the Greeks, the French; but it was a realistic game, and there were no fairies in it and nothing in the least frightening. As it was a night game, this was just as well.”
(From his Puppet Show of Memory, 1922.)
Points and Pauses
Gertrude Stein’s 1935 lecture “Poetry and Grammar” includes a section on punctuation, for which she had a peculiar disdain:
There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations that are not. Let us begin with the punctuations that are not. Of these the one but the first and the most the completely most uninteresting is the question mark. The question mark is alright when it is all alone when it is used as a brand on cattle or when it could be used in decoration but connected with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting.
In 2000, Kenneth Goldsmith rather archly removed the words from this passage and offered the bare punctuation as a poem titled “Gertrude Stein’s Punctuation from ‘Gertrude Stein on Punctuation'” (the full passage and the poem are both here). Goldsmith did the same thing with the punctuation chapter from Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses — a few hyphens and a period.
Carl Reuterswärd’s 1960 novel Prix Nobel consists entirely of punctuation marks. Reuterswärd felt that ordinary writing robs punctuation of its meaning; the surrounding words convey concepts and the commas, colons, and periods simply help to mark it. Removing the words, though, revealed an “interesting alternative: not to ignore syntax but certainly to forgo ‘the preserved meaning of others.’ The ‘absence’ that occurs is not mute. For want of ‘governing concepts’ punctuation marks lose their neutral value. They begin to speak an unuttered language out of that already expressed. This cannot help producing a ‘colon concept’ in you, a need of exclamation, of pauses, of periods, of parentheses.”
In 2005, Chinese novelist Hu Wenliang offered 140,000 yuan ($16,900 U.S.) to the reader who could decipher his novel «?», which consists entirely of punctuation marks.
The autobiography of the American eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748-1806) contains 8,847 words and no punctuation. When readers complained, he added a page of punctuation marks to the second edition, inviting them to “peper and solt it as they plese.”
06/30/2022 More: Reader Kevin Orlin Johnson sent this poem by David Morice, from the February 2012 issue of Word Ways:
% , & –
+ . ? /
“ :
% ;
+ $ [ \
It’s a limerick:
Percent comma ampersand dash
Plus period question mark slash
Quotation mark colon
Percent semicolon
Plus dollar sign bracket backslash
(Thanks, Kevin.)
Clairvoyance
When Raymond Smullyan was teaching probability at Princeton, he told one class about the birthday paradox — the fact that if there are 23 people in a room, the chances are greater than 50 percent that at least two of them share a birthday. There were only 19 students in the classroom, so he said that the chance that two of them shared a birthday was quite small.
One boy said, “I’ll bet you a quarter that two of us here have the same birthday.”
Smullyan thought about that for a moment and said, “Oh, of course! You know the birthday of someone else here as well as your own!”
The boy said, “No, I give you my word that I don’t know the birthday of anyone here other than my own. Nevertheless I’ll bet you that there are two of us here who have the same birthday.”
Smullyan took the bet and lost. Why?
Illumination
In a monastery cloisters on the edge of Venice is a sundial inscribed with the motto Horas non numero nisi serenas.
Literally that means “I don’t count the hours unless they are serene ones” (or “I count only the sunny hours”).
“But it really means, ‘When I come to die, the only moments that matter will have been the moments when I was at ease,'” writes Harry Mount in Amo, Amas, Amat and All That.
Of the motto, William Hazlitt wrote, “There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled.”
The Robben Island Notebooks
Sentenced in 1964 to life in prison, anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada got permission during his confinement to pursue a history degree through the University of South Africa. He used his access to books and writing materials to compile a series of secret notebooks in which he recorded quotations that inspired him. Together they form what used to be called a commonplace book — a series of personal memoranda that, taken together, illuminate the spirit of the compiler:
Ofttimes the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die. — Vittorio Alfieri
It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. — Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined (1873)
One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth. — Voltaire
The triumph of wicked men is always short-lived. — Honore de Balzac, The Black Sheep
(Form of oath-taking among Shoshone Indians is:) The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?
Conrad wrote that life sometimes made him feel like a cornered rat waiting to be clubbed.
Nobody knows what kind of government it is who has never been in prison. — Leo Tolstoy
Leve fit, quod bene fertur onus. (A burden becomes lightest when it is well borne.)
To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. — Sun Tzu
Verba volant, scripta manent. (The spoken word flees; the written word remains.) — Ancient Roman adage
(Peter Ustinov explains why he reads so much:) “If you’re going to be the prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is to make sure it’s well furnished.”
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. — Bertrand Russell
Altogether “Kathy” compiled seven notebooks over 26 years, drawing not just on his study materials and smuggled newspapers but on 5,000 books donated to the prison library by a Cape Town bookstore. Finally released in 1989, he went on to become a member of Parliament after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and served as President Nelson Mandela’s parliamentary counsellor until 1999.
One of his former warders, Christo Brand, told him, “I was supposed to be your master, but instead you became my mentor.”
(Sahm Venter, ed., Ahmed Kathrada’s Notebook From Robben Island, 2005.)
Early Days
In her 1914 book Una Mary: The Inner Life of a Child, Una Hunt, the daughter of geologist Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, set out to describe the subjective world of her young girlhood. Here’s an example — she had created an imaginary land she called My Country in which her alternate self, Una Mary, lived, and then established it in the Persian rug in the parlor, where her chessmen could play out their adventures:
A very yellow palm-leaf in one corner of the pattern was the Holy Land. I thought it was holey, full of holes. I had simply heard some one speak of having been there the winter before, and the name sounded sunny and yellow, a cheerful sort of place, full of caves in the soft rock. I thought the whole country must look rather like Swiss cheese to deserve its name. The Holy Land was, of course, simply infested by robbers. The Forty Thieves lived there, each with a cave to himself, all in a row, and for some reason it was always there that we hid from pirates.
The outside border of the rug was the sea. I felt sure, of course, that the world was bounded by the sea and if you sailed to the edge the ship would fall off, so the chessmen were always careful not to go beyond the second stripe of the border outside. …
The stem of one flower was the Charles River, where I had found the turtle eggs, and another was The Amazon. Always that name has fascinated me, The Amazon, and I feel sure the river itself is a tawny orange zigzag with huge, many-colored leaves and flowers growing out of it at unexpected angles. It was like that on the rug, and I chose that particular stem to be The Amazon because its color was like the sound of the word. There was another reason besides the fascination of the name itself which later made me include it in the geography of My Country, and that was because Brazil was my only association with Royalty.
Psychologist G. Stanley Hall said, “I would rather have written it myself than to have made any study of childhood that has ever appeared.” The whole thing is here.
Decalogue
Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for good writing:
- Never open a book with weather.
- Avoid prologues.
- Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
- Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
- Keep your exclamation points under control.
- Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
- Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
- Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
- Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
- Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”