In 1906, standing on a headland in northern Canada, Robert Peary spied a landmass about 130 miles away in the Arctic Ocean, at about 83°N 100°W.
An expedition eight years later found no sign of it. Peary’s landmass was never seen again.
Equivalent Expressions
What do these sentences have in common?
They’re all precisely the same length.
Waste Not, Want Not
The following resolutions were passed by the Board of Councilmen in Canton, Mississippi:–
- Resolved, by this Council, that we build a new Jail.
- Resolved, that the new Jail be built out of the materials of the old Jail.
- Resolved, that the old Jail be used until the new Jail is finished.
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-fields of Literature, 1875
Proof That 3 = 5
Unquote
“A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.” — Arthur Koestler
Off With Their Heads!
Show this bold Prussian that praises slaughter, slaughter brings rout. Teach this slaughter-lover his fall nears.
Grim, no? But remove the first letter of each word and the mood changes:
How his old Russian hat raises laughter — laughter rings out! Each, his laughter over, is all ears.
“Language,” wrote Flaubert, “is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
“The Anatomie Vivante”
There was a ‘living skeleton’ brought to England in 1825 by the name of Claude Seurat. He was born in 1798 and was in his twenty-seventh year. He usually ate in the course of a day a penny roll and drank a small quantity of wine. His skeleton was plainly visible, over which the skin was stretched tightly. The distance from the chest to the spine was less than 3 inches, and internally this distance was less. The pulsations of the heart were plainly visible. He was in good health and slept well. His voice was very weak and shrill. The circumference of this man’s biceps was only 4 inches.
— George Gould and Walter Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, 1896
In a Word
decemnovenarianize
v. to act like a person of the 19th century
A Myth Melts
On Nov. 1, 1986, Nancy C. Knight collected two identical snowflakes on a glass plate about 20,000 feet over Wausau, Wis.
“In many years of snow-crystals collection,” she wrote in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, “the author has seen no other example of such crystals, nor are any given in the standard references.”
Safety First
More valuable safety lessons for your children, from The Book of Accidents (1831):
“Little children who can just reach to the top of a table, often endeavor to drink from the spout of a tea-pot; and in consequence scald their mouths and throats, and die miserable deaths in a few hours.”
“Wicked and malicious boys often throw stones, by which they not only hurt and maim one another, but often knock out an eye and are disfigured for life.”
“Hundreds of children are killed every year by leaning out of windows. … In another moment [this little girl] may be dashed upon the rocky pavement below, to be picked up by her parents a mangled corpse.”
Bonus parable: “The writer knows of a little boy who was very fond of being in the kitchen, that he might see how Johnny-cakes and pies, and all such things were made, and from his talkativeness occasioned considerable trouble. In the absence of the cook for a short time, what should he do but go and sit himself down into a kettle of boiling hot water! His screams soon brought his mother, and with difficulty his life was saved.”