2502 = 2 + 502
Oh, Never Mind
Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the dam of the Hao Waterfall when Zhuangzi said, ‘See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!’
Huizi said, ‘You’re not a fish — how do you know what fish enjoy?’
Zhuangzi said, ‘You’re not I, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?’
Huizi said, ‘I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know. On the other hand, you’re certainly not a fish — so that still proves you don’t know what fish enjoy!’
Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s go back to your original question, please. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy — so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the Hao.’
— Zhuangzi, China, fourth century B.C.
Walking Wounded
John Watson, the companion and biographer of Sherlock Holmes, was hit by a Jezail bullet while serving with the British army in Afghanistan.
Curiously, though, the wound migrates.
In “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), Watson says he was struck in the shoulder, but in “The Sign of Four” (1890) the wound has moved to his leg, which Watson says aches at changes in the weather.
One would think that this might have drawn Watson’s attention, as he was a medical doctor. But evidently he lacked his friend’s perspicacity — in “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” (1892) he refers only to a bullet wound in “one of my limbs.”
In a Word
spaneria
n. a scarcity of men
spanogyny
n. a scarcity of women
Sound Over Sense
“I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.”
That’s Warren G. Harding, and God knows what he meant. Harding’s utterances were so impenetrable that they developed a sort of fascinated following. “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered,” wrote H.L. Mencken, who dubbed it Gamalielese. “It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
When Harding succumbed to a stroke in 1923, E.E. Cummings wrote, “The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”
04/08/2021 UPDATE: This example isn’t really fair to Harding — Mencken misrepresented the quote, changing a semicolon after mitigate to a comma. (Thanks, @nacreousnereid.)
“The Laird of Balnamoon and the Brock”
The laird, so Dean Ramsay had the story sent him, once riding past a high steep bank, stopped opposite a hole in it, and said, ‘John, I saw a brock [badger] gang in there.’ — ‘Did ye?’ said John; ‘wull ye haud my horse, sir?’ — ‘Certainly,’ said the laird, and away rushed John for a spade. After digging for half an hour, he came back, nigh speechless to the laird, who had regarded him musingly. ‘I canna find him, sir,’ said John. — ”Deed,’ said the laird, very coolly, ‘I wad ha’ wondered if ye had, for it’s ten years sin’ I saw him gang in there.’
— Adam White, Heads and Tales; or, Anecdotes and Stories of Quadrupeds and Other Beasts, 1870
Senselessness Squared
The armistice that ended World War I went into effect at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11 (“the 11th of the 11th of the 11th”) in 1918.
Gordon Brook-Shepherd writes: “[A]ny firing still going on ended on the last second of the tenth hour, sometimes with droll little ceremonies — as on the British front near Mons, where [a] German machine-gunner blazed off his last belt of ammunition during the last minute of the war and then, as the hour struck, stood up on his parapet, removed his steel helmet, bowed politely to what was now the ex-enemy opposite, and disappeared.”
The last casualties were not so droll. At 10:45 a.m., French soldier Augustin Trébuchon was running to tell his friends that hot soup would be served after the ceasefire when he was shot and killed.
And in the Forest of Argonne, American private Henry Gunther charged a German position just before 11:00 and was shot down. He died 60 seconds before the end of the war.
Trivium
The shortest chapter in the Bible is Psalm 117. The longest is Psalm 119.
This knowledge can come in handy.
All Aboard
The smallest integer whose name includes all five vowels is ONE THOUSAND FIVE.
Feedback
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln received this letter from a Pete Muggins in Fillmore, La.:
God damn your god damned old Hellfired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family’s god dammed hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation.
“Quarrel not at all,” Lincoln wrote on another occasion. “No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.”