There is a famous Israeli singer called Shlomi Shabat. I have jocularly named him for years Placido Domingo since [Shlomi] means peaceful (from shalom, ‘peace’) and [shabat] is Sabbath (the Jews’ Sunday). Placido Domingo is Spanish for ‘peaceful Sunday.’
— Ghil’ad Zuckermann, in Word Ways 32:1, February 1999
In 1854, a correspondent wrote to Notes and Queries asking about the origins of this couplet:
Perturbabantur Constantinopolitani
Innumerabilibus sollicitudinibus.
[“Constantinople is much perturbed.”]
He got this reply:
“When I first learned to scan verses, somewhere about thirty years ago, the lines produced by your correspondent P. were in every child’s mouth, with this story attached to them. It was said that Oxford had received from Cambridge the first line of the distich, with a challenge to produce a corresponding line consisting of two words only. To this challenge Oxford replied by sending back the second line, pointing out, at the same time, the false quantity in the word Constantinŏpolitani.”
Reader Eliot Morrison, a protein biochemist, has been looking for the longest English word found in the human proteome — the full set of proteins that can be expressed by the human body. Proteins are chains composed of amino acids, and the most common 20 are represented by the letters A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, and Y. “These amino acids have different chemical properties,” Eliot writes, “and the sequence influences how the whole chain folds in three dimensions, which in turn determines the structural and functional properties of the protein.”
The longest English word he’s found is TARGETEER, at nine letters, in the uncharacterized protein C12orf42. The whole sequence of C12orf42 is:
MSTVICMKQR EEEFLLTIRP FANRMQKSPC YIPIVSSATL WDRSTPSAKH IPCYERTSVP CSRFINHMKN FSESPKFRSL HFLNFPVFPE RTQNSMACKR LLHTCQYIVP RCSVSTVSFD EESYEEFRSS PAPSSETDEA PLIFTARGET EERARGAPKQ AWNSSFLEQL VKKPNWAHSV NPVHLEAQGI HISRHTRPKG QPLSSPKKNS GSAARPSTAI GLCRRSQTPG ALQSTGPSNT ELEPEERMAV PAGAQAHPDD IQSRLLGASG NPVGKGAVAM APEMLPKHPH TPRDRRPQAD TSLHGNLAGA PLPLLAGAST HFPSKRLIKV CSSAPPRPTR RFHTVCSQAL SRPVVNAHLH
And there are more: “There are also a number of eight-letters words found: ASPARKLE (Uniprot code: Q86UW7), DATELESS (Q9ULP0-3), GALAGALA (Q86VD7), GRISETTE (Q969Y0), MISSPEAK (Q8WXH0), REELRALL (Q96FL8), RELASTER (Q8IVB5), REVERSAL (Q5TZA2), and SLAVERER (Q2TAC2).” I wonder if there’s a sentence in us somewhere.
(Thanks, Eliot.)
Ferdinand Demara earned his reputation as the Great Impostor: For over 22 years he criss-crossed the country, posing as everything from an auditor to a zoologist and stealing a succession of identities to fool his employers. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review Demara’s motivation, morality, and techniques — and the charismatic spell he seemed to cast over others.
We’ll also make Big Ben strike 13 and puzzle over a movie watcher’s cat.
In 1929, detective novelist Arthur Upfield wanted to devise the perfect murder, so he started a discussion among his friends in Western Australia. He was pleased with their solution — until local workers began disappearing, as if the book were coming true. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the Murchison murders, a disturbing case of life imitating art.
We’ll also incite a revolution and puzzle over a perplexing purchase.
What’s remarkable about this set of words?
BIOLOGY DEATHLY SLOSHED BASTARD SELVAGE FISSILE DALLIES FLAVORS
In April 1909, Carl Jung asked Sigmund Freud his opinion on precognition and parapsychology. As Freud was dismissing them, Jung felt “a curious sensation”:
It was as if my diaphragm was made of iron and was becoming red-hot — a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over us. I said to Freud: ‘There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon.’
‘Oh come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.’
‘It is not,’ I replied. ‘You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another loud report!’ Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.
“To this day I do no know what gave me this certainty,” Jung said later. “But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his mistrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had done something against him. I never afterwards discussed the incident with him.”
Freud was not impressed. In a letter to Jung he wrote, “At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never again heard after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem.”
A fuller account is here. It’s not clear that they ever discovered the source of the sound, but note that Freud’s letter was written in the same month as the experience, where Jung’s recollection was made in an interview half a century later — when (perhaps among other things) he had misremembered the location of the bookshelf.
I just bumbled into this: In 1978 Isaac Asimov judged a limerick contest run by Mohegan Community College in Norwich, Conn. He chose this as the best of 12,000 entries:
The bustard’s an exquisite fowl,
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By grace of a fortunate vowel.
It was written by retired Yale official George D. Vaill. Asimov said, “The idea is very clever and made me laugh, and the one-word fourth line is delightful.”
With The Scientific Dial Primer (1912), Andrew Hallner aimed to make a universal phrasebook for all mankind. The dial contains five rings, and code words can be constructed by working from the center outward. For example, the first ring contains 5 vowels and the second 20 consonants; these can be combined to create 100 two-letter words that are used to represent the numbers 1-100 (ti, for example, means 56). Adding the third ring yields 2,525 one-syllable three-letter words, which are given specific meanings (jad refers to a butcher knife, dag to cement in sacks). With some refinements, the system can encode a message as specific as this:
We shall discard all Sunday newspapers, for these are the chief sinners and temptors, being themselves Sabbath-breakers, and maintain but one or two dailies. But these you need not look at, for I will read to you such articles and extracts as relate to Congress and general intelligence, profitable and elevating to know about.
This assertion would be represented everywhere by the same code, qema; speakers of different languages would only need local phrasebooks that explain this meaning to each in his own tongue.
“By writing or pointing to the Scientific Dial Code-Word, therefore, you can communicate intelligently with any nationality on our globe,” Hallner wrote. “You can travel in or through any country, find the way, buy tickets, give orders in hotels and restaurants, attend to toilet, address the barber, arrange your baths, and do anything and everything necessary in travel; and in ordering goods, in exchanging money, and in carrying on general business transactions. And all this knowledge may be acquired in a week! For to acquire and make use of this knowledge is only to understand the Scientific Dial and the principles involved.”
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