A Poet’s Arsenal

Noted in passing: In the May 2004 issue of Word Ways, Max Maven notes that “English words containing ‘ag’ almost invariably have negative meanings, usually rather harsh.” He cites BRAG, DRAG, FLAG, GAG, HAG, LAG, NAG, RAG, SAG, SLAG, SNAG, and SWAG, among others.

In May 1984 Bruce Price pointed out that words rhyming with ash tend to be “words of terrible action, of great vigor and violence”:

BASH, BRASH, CLASH, CRASH, DASH, FLASH, GASH, GNASH, HASH, LASH, MASH, PASH, PLASH, RASH, SLASH, SMASH, SPLASH, STASH, THRASH, TRASH

There are exceptions, of course. I wonder if there are any similar patterns among positive words?

April 17, 2017 | Language

Detente

In his Book of Good Love (1330), Juan Ruiz tells of a silent debate between Greece and Rome. The Romans had no laws and asked the Greeks to give them some. The Greeks feared that they were too ignorant and challenged them first to prove themselves before the wise men of Greece. The Romans agreed to a debate but asked that it be conducted in gestures, as they did not understand the Greek language. The Greeks put forward a learned scholar, and the Romans, feeling themselves at a disadvantage, put forward a ruffian and told him to use whatever gestures he felt inspired to make.

The two mounted high seats before the assembled crowd. The Greek held out his index finger, and the Roman responded with his thumb, index, and middle fingers. The Greek held out his open palm, and the Roman responded with a fist. Then the Greek announced that the Romans deserved to be given laws.

Each side then asked its champion to explain what had happened.

They asked the Greek what he had said to the Roman by his gestures, and what he had answered him. He said: ‘I said that there is one God; the Roman said He was One in Three Persons, and made a sign to that effect.

Next I said that all was by the will of God; he answered that God held everything in his power, and he spoke truly. When I saw that they understood and believed in the Trinity, I understood that they deserved assurance of [receiving] laws.’

They asked the hoodlum what his notion was; he replied: ‘He said that with his finger he would smash my eye; I was mighty unhappy about this and I got mighty angry, and I answered him with rage, with answer, and with fury,

that, right in front of everybody, I would smash his eyes with my two fingers and his teeth with my thumb; right after that he told me to watch him because he would give me a big slap on my ears [that would leave them] ringing.

I answered him that I would give him such a punch that in all his life he would never get even for it. As soon as he saw that he had the quarrel in bad shape, he quit making threats in a spot where they thought nothing of him.’

Ruiz writes, “This is why the proverb of the shrewd old woman says, ‘No word is bad if you don’t take it badly.’ You will see that my word is well said if it is well understood.”

(From Laura Kendrick’s The Game of Love, 1988.)

April 11, 2017 | Language · Society

Inspiration

Many German beer brands combine a place name with the word Hell, which means “pale” and indicates a pale lager:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rennsteig_Hell_Vollbier,_VEB_GK_Rennsteig-Meiningen_Werk_Meiningen_Etikett_(DDR).jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 2010 German businessman Florian Krause recalled that he’d grown up near an Austrian village called Fucking:

So he brewed a pale lager and named it for the town:

The European Union trademark office initially balked at registering the name, but Krause explained his thinking and they accepted it. “The word combination claimed contains no semantic indication that could refer to a certain person or group of persons,” the office noted. “Nor does it incite a particular act.”

“It cannot even be understood as an instruction that the reader should go to hell.”

April 11, 2017April 10, 2017 | Language · Oddities

Podcast Episode 149: The North Pond Hermit

https://www.flickr.com/photos/38976602@N05/4806329064 — Image: Flickr

Without any forethought or preparation, Christopher Knight walked into the Maine woods in 1986 and lived there in complete solitude for the next 27 years, subsisting on what he was able to steal from local cabins. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the North Pond hermit, one man’s attempt to divorce himself completely from civilization.

We’ll also look for coded messages in crosswords and puzzle over an ineffective snake.

See full show notes …

April 10, 2017September 30, 2017 | Crime · Podcast · Society

An Audio Ghost

When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, it was thought that no recordings of his voice had survived. But in 2013 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History announced that it had a fragile wax-on-cardboard disc that Bell had made as an experiment in sound recording … and that now this could be played using optical scanning technology.

The disc is dated April 15, 1885. Bell spends most of the 4-minute recording reciting figures, but he concludes with the distinct words “Hear my voice: … Alexander … Graham … Bell.” Bell biographer Charlotte Gray wrote:

In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface to the play).

I heard, too, the deliberate enunciation of a devoted husband whose deaf wife, Mabel, was dependent on lip reading. And true to his granddaughter’s word, the intonation of the British Isles was unmistakable in Bell’s speech. The voice is vigorous and forthright — as was the inventor, at last speaking to us across the years.

Amazingly, scientists resurrected the voice of Bell’s father too — a man who had been born in 1819.

April 7, 2017April 6, 2017 | History · Technology

The Extra Mile

Many thanks to podcast listener Matt Taylor for this:

In 1992 British journalist James May was hired to compile the annual “Road Test Year Book” for Autocar magazine, a collection of the year’s car reviews. The task “was extremely boring and took several months,” May said, so to amuse himself he began to hide acrostics in the text. The design of the supplement called for four reviews on each two-page spread, with the first letter of each review presented as a large red capital letter. May arranged the text so that the four red letters on one spread spelled out ROAD, another spread spelled TEST, and so on.

Readers who noticed this might have been disappointed to find that the pattern didn’t continue — the four-letter phrases soon reverted to non-words such as SOYO and UTHI.

But those with the patience to put all the non-words together found a masterly 81-letter message:

SO YOU THINK ITS REALLY GOOD YEAH YOU SHOULD TRY MAKING THE BLOODY THING UP ITS A REAL PAIN IN THE ARSE

Autocar’s editors overlooked the acrostic entirely — they learned about it only when readers called in seeking a prize.

May was fired, but he went on to bigger things: He was a co-presenter of the motoring program Top Gear for 13 years.

April 6, 2017April 5, 2017 | Language

Quickie

A puzzle by Frank Morgan: The meaning of a common English word becomes plural when an A is added at its start. What is the word?

	Select Click for Answer
YES becomes AYES. From MIT Technology Review, July/August 2007.

March 29, 2017April 9, 2017 | Puzzles

Breath Control

In 1999 the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern passed a law governing the labeling of beef; its short title was Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (PDF). The hyphen indicates that the first word would have the same ending as the second; thus the two words are Rinderkennzeichnungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz. (The law’s formal long title is Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung, or “Law on Delegation of Duties for Supervision of Cattle Marking and Beef Labeling.”)

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz was nominated for Word of the Year by the German Language Society. Here it is sung by the Australian National University’s UniLodge Choir:

There’s more: In 2003 a decree was passed modifying real estate regulations; its short title was Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung. Can someone sing that?

March 28, 2017April 3, 2017 | Language

A Mathless Math Puzzle

$hess bug puzzle$

Richard Hess posed this problem in the Spring 1980 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal. At noon on Monday, a bug departs the upper left corner, X, of a p × q rectangle and crawls within the rectangle to the diagonally opposite corner, Y, arriving there at 6 p.m. He sleeps there until noon on Tuesday, when he sets out again for X, crawling along another path within the rectangle and reaching X at 6 p.m. Prove that at some time on Tuesday the bug was no farther than p from his location at the same time on Monday.

	Select Click for Answer
Well, suppose there are two bugs making their journeys simultaneously — one departs X as the other departs Y, each headed for the opposite corner, and they travel different paths within the rectangle, arriving at their destinations simultaneously. At some time during their journeys they’ll both be the same horizontal distance from the left side of the rectangle. Since both paths remain within the rectangle, at that moment the distance between them can’t be greater than p. The editors received this answer from six readers, including Hess. “Their solutions were characterized by the complete absence of mathematical symbols and mathematical jargon,” they noted. “While there is certainly no objection to mathematical solutions to mathematical problems, a simple word-solution intelligible to any layman is to be preferred. Some of the other submitted solutions were profuse with subscripts, coordinates, inequalities, vinculi, functional relations, intermediate value theorems, Greek symbols, graphs, continuous functions and derivatives — all reminiscent of the sledgehammer method of swatting a fly.” The original problem is here (PDF, page 135).

Click for Answer