In 1939, an ocean liner carrying 900 Jewish refugees left Nazi Germany seeking sanctuary in North America, but it was turned away by every nation it appealed to. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the so-called “voyage of the damned” and the plight of its increasingly desperate passengers.
We’ll also discuss the employment prospects for hermits in Seattle and puzzle over the contentment of a condemned woman.
The word cliché was originally the French name for a printing plate that was prepared for convenience to print a commonly used phrase. The plates clicked as they were being used, and cliché is the past participle of clicher, a variant of cliquer, “to click.”
Interestingly, another name for this plate is stereotype.
In 1947, the price of a candy bar in British Columbia rose from 5 to 8 cents, and the local teenagers organized a surprisingly effective “strike” that soon spread across the country. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Canada’s unlikely “candy bar war,” which gripped the nation for 10 days before ending with a surprising twist.
We’ll also take a grueling automobile ride across 1903 America and puzzle over the intentions of a masked man.
In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll share seven oddities from Greg’s research, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s encounter with a perceptive Boston cabbie to a computer’s failed attempts to rewrite Aesop’s fables.
We’ll also hear boxer Gene Tunney’s thoughts on Shakespeare and puzzle over how a man on a park bench can recognize a murder at sea.
In the November 2009 issue of Word Ways, Richard Lederer lists his favorite “eye rhymes” — if English made any sense, these would sound alike:
Even worse: beat–great–sweat–caveat–whereat and bough–dough–enough–hiccough– lough–through–trough–thorough.
And shouldn’t encourage rhyme with entourage?
12/15/2015 A related image, from reader Jon Jerome:
Suppose you hire two proofreaders to go through the same manuscript independently. The first reports A mistakes, the second reports B mistakes, and C mistakes are reported by both. How can you estimate how many errors remain undiscovered?
Let M be the total number of mistakes in the manuscript. Then the number undiscovered by the two proofreaders is M – (A + B – C). Let p and q be the probabilities that the first and second proofreaders, respectively, notice any given mistake. Then A ≈ pM and B ≈ qM. And because they work independently, the chance that they both find a given mistake is C ≈ pqM.
But now
and the number of misprints that remain unnoticed is just
This means that as long as the proofreaders work independently, you can estimate the number of errors they’ve overlooked without even knowing how skillful they are. If they find a large number of mistakes in common but relatively few independently, then the manuscript is probably relatively clean. But if they generate large independent lists of errors with few in common, there are probably many mistakes remaining to be found (which matches our intuition).
(George Pólya, “Probabilities in Proofreading,” American Mathematical Monthly 83:1 [January 1976], 42.)
In the December 2012 issue of 1 Across magazine, longtime crossword composer John Graham included a special instruction above one of his puzzles:
“I have 18dn of the 19; no 27, just 13 15; no 2 or 6 or 1dn 26 yet — plenty of 10, though I wouldn’t have chosen the timing.”
Solvers discovered that 18 down was CANCER and 19 across was OESOPHAGUS. The full message read:
“I have CANCER of the OESOPHAGUS; no CHEMOTHERAPY, just PALLIATIVE CARE; no NARCOTIC or STENT or MACMILLAN NURSE yet — plenty of MERRIMENT, though I wouldn’t have chosen the timing.”
The puzzle was reprinted as cryptic crossword No. 25,842 in the Guardian the following month.
“It seemed the natural thing to do somehow,” Graham said. “It just seemed right.” He died in November 2013, and the Guardian published a tribute crossword to remember him.
(Thanks, Anthony.)
Here’s a curious invention from 1916, in the early days of motion pictures: It’s a machine designed to suggest plot ideas by randomly juxtaposing ideas. Words, pictures, and even bars of music are printed on paper rollers, and the writer turns these to present six elements that form the basis of a story.
In the example above, the machine presents the words aged, aviator, bribes, cannibal, carousal, and escape. “These particular words readily suggest, for instance, that an aged aviator after flying through the air on a long trip, lands finally on a desolate island where he is met by a cannibal, whom he is forced to bribe to secure his safety. After an interim which is full of possibilities as a basis of a story, a carousal ensues following which the aviator escapes.”
Inventor Arthur Blanchard says that this technique can be used to inspire any fictional work, from a cartoon to a song, but he patented it specifically as a “movie writer.” Whether it inspired any movies I don’t know.
In 1983, Soviet satellites reported that the United States had launched a nuclear missile toward Moscow, and one officer had only minutes to decide whether to initiate a counterstrike. In today’s show we’ll learn about some nuclear near misses from the Cold War that came to light only decades after they occurred.
We’ll also hear listeners’ input about crescent moons and newcomers to India, and puzzle over the fatal consequences of a man’s departure from his job.
Eight ways to pronounce the letter X, from wordplay maven Dmitri Borgmann:
eks: x-ray
gz: exist
gzh: luxurious
kris: Xmas
ks: sex
ksh: anxious
z: xylophone
__: faux pas
He adds three more: According to Webster’s Second Edition, xeres is an alternate name for sherry wine in which the X can be pronounced either as H or as SH. And arguably the X in except is pronounced like the letter K, as “the sibilant portion of the usual X sound has fused with the sound of the C immediately following.” If we accept these, then the total rises to 11.
(Dmitri A. Borgmann, “The Ultimate Homonym Group,” Word Ways 17:4 [November 1984], 224-228.)
