Search Results for: in a word

Update

Hi, all. Just another update here — all the libraries here are still closed, so I need to keep the Futility Closet website suspended through June, as I can’t do the research until they reopen. We’re fine here otherwise, and we’re still producing the podcast each week in the meantime. At the moment there’s no word on when things might return to normal; if I can’t start up the site again in July then I’ll post an update here. If you have any questions you can always reach me at greg@futilitycloset.com. Stay safe!

Greg

| Uncategorized

Podcast Episode 295: An Unlikely Attempt on Everest

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

In 1932, Yorkshireman Maurice Wilson chose a startling way to promote his mystical beliefs: He would fly to Mount Everest and climb it alone. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Wilson’s misguided adventure, which one writer called “the most incredible story in all the eventful history of Mount Everest.”

Well also explore an enigmatic musician and puzzle over a mighty cola.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Podcast Episode 292: Fordlandia

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fordlandia.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1927, Henry Ford decided to build a plantation in the Amazon to supply rubber for his auto company. The result was Fordlandia, an incongruous Midwestern-style town in the tropical rainforest. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the checkered history of Ford’s curious project — and what it revealed about his vision of society.

We’ll also consider some lifesaving seagulls and puzzle over a false alarm.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast · Society · Technology

For What It’s Worth

In a 2009 survey, readers of Stuttgarter Nachrichten, the largest newspaper in Stuttgart, chose Muggeseggele as the most beautiful word in Swabian German.

Muggeseggele means “the scrotum of a housefly.” It’s used ironically to describe a very small length.

| Language

Counting Sheep

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gruban/3980674035
Image: Flickr

Shepherds in Northern England used to tally their flocks using a base-20 numbering system. They’d count a score of sheep using the words:

Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip,
Azer, sayzer, acka, konta, dick,
Yanna-dick, tanna-dick, tethera-dick, methera-dick, bumfit,
Yanna-bum, tanna-bum, tethera-bum, methera-bum, jigget

… and then denote the completion of a group by taking up a stone or marking the ground before commencing the next count.

These systems vary by region — Wikipedia has them laid out in pleasing tables.

(Thanks, Brieuc.)

| Language · Science & Math

Disharmony

Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité’s 1920 poem “The Chaos” is a polemic on the senselessness of English pronunciation:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.

The full text is here.

| Language · Poems

“It Is Not Enough to Mean Well”

Maxims of Theodore Roosevelt:

  • A bad man of ability is worse than a bad man of no ability.
  • It is almost as irritating to be patronized as to be wronged.
  • Timid endurance of wrongdoing may often be to commit one of the greatest evils that one can possibly commit against one’s fellows.
  • The lives of truest heroism are those in which there are no great deeds to look back upon. It is the little things well done that go to make up a successful and truly good life.
  • Our system of government is the best in the world for a people able to carry it on. Only the highest type of people can carry it on.
  • No one ought to submit to being imposed upon, but before you act always stop to consider the rights of others before standing up for your own.
  • The wicked who prosper are never a pleasant sight.
  • It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
  • Don’t let practical politics mean foul politics.
  • For almost every gain there is a penalty.
  • There is grave danger in attempting to establish invariable rules.
  • Woe to all of us if ever as a people we grow to condone evil because it is successful.
  • Remember that the shots that count in war are the ones that hit.
  • What every man needs is robust virtue, that will enable him to go out into the world and remain true to himself.
  • Capacity for work is absolutely necessary, and no man can be said to live in the true sense of the word if he does not work.
  • In doing your work in the great world, it is a safe plan to follow a rule I once heard preached on the football field: Don’t flinch; don’t fall; hit the the line hard.

(More here.)

| Quotations

Ghosts in Color

https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/7yhxce/stare_at_the_red_dot_on_her_nose_for_30_second/

From Reddit: Stare at the red dot on this woman’s nose for 30 seconds, then look at a white wall and blink.

Erasmus Darwin, 1786:

I was surprised, and agreeably amused, with the following experiment. I covered a paper about four inches square with yellow, and with a pen filled with a blue colour wrote upon the middle of it the word BANKS in capitals, and sitting with my back to the sun, fixed my eyes for a minute exactly on the centre of the letter N in the middle of the word; after closing my eyes, and shading them somewhat with my hand, the word was distinctly seen in the spectrum in yellow letters on a blue field; and then, on opening my eyes on a yellowish wall at twenty feet distance, the magnified name of BANKS appeared written on the wall in golden characters.

| Science & Math

Heel!

Minutes of a borough council meeting, quoted by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge in The Reader Over Your Shoulder, 1943:

Councillor Trafford took exception to the proposed notice at the entrance of South Park: “No dogs must be brought to this Park except on a lead.” He pointed out that this order would not prevent an owner from releasing his pets, or pet, from a lead when once safely inside the park.

The Chairman (Colonel Vine): What alternative wording would you propose, Councillor?

Councillor Trafford: “Dogs are not allowed in this Park without leads.”

Councillor Hogg: Mr. Chairman, I object. The order should be addressed to the owners, not to the dogs.

Councillor Trafford: That is a nice point. Very well then: “Owners of dogs are not allowed in this Park unless they keep them on leads.”

Councillor Hogg: Mr. Chairman, I object. Strictly speaking, this would prevent me as a dog-owner from leaving my dog in the back-garden at home and walking with Mrs. Hogg across the Park.

Councillor Trafford: Mr. Chairman, I suggest that our legalistic friend be asked to redraft the notice himself.

Councillor Hogg: Mr. Chairman, since Councillor Trafford finds it so difficult to improve on my original wording, I accept. “Nobody without his dog on a lead is allowed in this Park.”

Councillor Trafford: Mr. Chairman, I object. Strictly speaking, this notice would prevent me, as a citizen who owns no dog, from walking in the Park without first acquiring one.

Councillor Hogg (with some warmth): Very simply, then: “Dogs must be led in this Park.”

Councillor Trafford: Mr. Chairman, I object: this reads as if it were a general injunction to the Borough to lead their dogs into the Park.

Councillor Hogg interposed a remark for which he was called to order; upon his withdrawing it, it was directed to be expunged from the Minutes.

The Chairman: Councillor Trafford, Councillor Hogg has had three tries; you have had only two …

Councillor Trafford: “All dogs must be kept on leads in this Park.”

The Chairman: I see Councillor Hogg rising quite rightly to raise another objection. May I anticipate him with another amendment: “All dogs in this Park must be kept on the lead.”

This draft was put to the vote and carried unanimously, with two abstentions.

| Language

To Whom It May Concern

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Cerne_Abbas_Giant_-_004.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Carved into a hill in Dorset is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 55-meter nude figure that carries a club and is rather obviously male. In November 1932 the Home Office received a letter from local resident Walter L. Long on which he’d sketched the giant. He wrote:

If this sketch offends, please remember that we have the same subject, representing a giant 27,000 times life size, facing the main road from Dorchester to Sherborne, and only some quarter to half a mile distant.

With the support of the Bishop of Salisbury, another Bishop, and representatives of other religions, I appealed to the National Trust, but this society exists only to preserve that which is entrusted to it, and consequently does not consider the obscenity of this figure is a matter on which I can act. In this figure’s counterpart in Sussex, Sex has been eliminated altogether; the other extreme.

Were the Cerne Giant converted into a simple nude, no exception would be taken to it. It is its impassioned obscenity that offends all who have the interest of the rising generation at heart, and I, we, appeal to you to make this figure conform to our Christian standards of civilization.

Archival records show that the matter was referred to one S.W. Harris, who debated what would satisfy Mr. Long. Should they call the police? Plant some strategic fig trees? He noted that the figure had stood without complaint for two or three thousand years, “or from 1/3 to one half the Biblical age of the Earth.” At last he sent this reply:

With reference to your letter of 14th November, I am directed by the Secretary of State to say that he has caused inquiry to be made and finds that the prehistoric figure of which you complain — the Giant of Cerne — is a national monument, scheduled as such, and vested in the National Trust. In the circumstances the Secretary of State regrets that he cannot see his way to take any action in the matter.

Seven years later Harris shared Long’s letter with a colleague, who wrote of the giant, “He is an old scandal, but he has stood there and scandalised for thousands of years and I hope [he] will do so for thousands more.”

(National Archives, In Their Own Words: Letters From History, 2016.)

| Society