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Podcast Episode 11: A Woolf in Sheikh’s Clothing

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Irish practical joker Horace de Vere Cole orchestrated his masterpiece in 1910: He dressed four friends as Abyssinian princes and inveigled a tour of a British battleship. One of the friends, improbably, was Virginia Woolf (far left) disguised in a false beard and turban. We’ll describe how the prank was inspired and follow the six through their tension-filled visit to the HMS Dreadnought.

We’ll also examine the value of whistles to Benjamin Franklin and present the next Futility Closet Challenge.

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World View

In Other Inquisitions, Borges writes of a strange taxonomy in an ancient Chinese encyclopedia:

On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g), stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

This is fanciful, but it has the ring of truth — different cultures can classify the world in surprisingly different ways. In traditional Dyirbal, an aboriginal language of Australia, each noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words that classify all objects in the universe:

  • bayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc.
  • balan: women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the hairy mary grub, anything connected with water or fire, sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc.
  • balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake
  • bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yamsticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises and language, etc.

“The fact is that people around the world categorize things in ways that both boggle the Western mind and stump Western linguists and anthropologists,” writes UC-Berkeley linguist George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). “More often than not, the linguist or anthropologist just throws up his hands and resorts to giving a list — a list that one would not be surprised to find in the writings of Borges.”

| Language · Literature · Science & Math

Beneath the Surface

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In Syntactic Structures (1957), to illustrate the difference between a meaningful sentence and a grammatical one, Noam Chomsky offered the expression Colorless green ideas sleep furiously as an example of a grammatical sentence that’s nonsense.

Naturally, some readers took this as a challenge — within months, students at Stanford had set up a competition to show that the expression could be understood as a meaningful sentence. Here’s one of the prizewinning entries:

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

More entries are here. From David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, 2011.

| Language

The Tombstone House

This unassuming house in Petersburg, Va., has an odd history — it was constructed from the tombstones of Union soldiers who had besieged the city in 1864. The curator of the city’s museum told author Gwyn Headley that, apparently to save on maintenance, nearly 2,000 marble headstones were removed from Poplar Grove Cemetery and sold to a Mr. O.E. Young, who assembled them into a two-story house.

“The tombstones face inward, so as the owner lay in bed the names of the dead stood about his head,” Headley writes in Architectural Follies in America (1996). “Later they were plastered over so that their descendants leave none the wiser.”

“The last word must be left to the lady living next door to the Tombstone House, who confessed with massive political incorrectness, ‘Ah don’t rightly see what all the fuss was about. They was jist Union boys.'”

| Oddities

Franklin’s Mint

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More wisdom from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One.
  • The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.
  • The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise.
  • Prosperity discovers Vice, Adversity, Virtue.
  • God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.
  • The same man cannot be both Friend and Flatterer.
  • Beauty and folly are old companions.
  • Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.
  • Hear Reason, or she’ll make you feel her.
  • What’s given shines, what’s receiv’d is rusty.
  • Sally laughs at everything you say. Why? Because she has fine teeth.
  • Words may shew a man’s Wit, but Actions his Meaning.
  • It’s common for men to give pretended reasons instead of one real one.
  • Fear to do ill, and you need fear nought else.
  • Success has ruin’d many a Man.

Altho’ thy teacher act not as he preaches,
Yet ne’ertheless, if good, do what he teaches;
Good counsel, failing men may give, for why,
He that’s aground knows where the shoal doth lie.

| Literature

Rich Talk

Some favorite words of Stockholm University linguist Mikael Parkvall, from his Limits of Language (2006):

  • klunen (Dutch): “to walk or run overland with skates on (usually from one body of frozen water to another)”
  • aɣone (Kuot): “to drink from a bottle in such a fashion that drool trickles from the mouth back into the bottle”
  • fringsen (German): “to steal coal from railway wagons or potatoes from fields in order to survive”
  • knedlikový (Czech): “rather partial to dumplings”
  • qamigartuk (Yup’ik): “he goes seal-hunting with a small sled and kayak in the spring”
  • baleŋga (Chavacano): “excessive swinging of arms while walking”
  • kallsup (Swedish): “a gulp of water that a bather accidentally inhales”
  • googly (English): “(of an off-breaking cricket ball) disguised by the bowler with an apparent leg-break action”

Gunwinggu, spoken in northwestern Australia, uses different verbs to describe the hopping of a black wallaroo (Macropus bernardus) (kamurlbardme), the hopping of an agile wallaby (Macropus agilis) (kalurlhlurme), the hopping of a male antilopine wallaroo (Macropus antilopinus) (kamawudme), and the hopping of a female antilopine wallaroo (kadjalwahme).

| Language

Penny Wisdom

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More proverbs from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Those who have nothing to trouble them, will be troubled at nothing.
  • Great modesty often hides great merit.
  • The Muses love the Morning.
  • Do me the favour to deny me at once.
  • There’s none deceived but he that trusts.
  • If evils come not, then our fears are vain; and if they do, fear but augments the pain.
  • Full of courtesie, full of craft.
  • The tongue is ever turning the aching tooth.
  • Nothing dries sooner than a Tear.
  • In the Affairs of this World Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it.
  • An old young man will be a young old man.
  • The prodigal generally does more injustice than the covetous.
  • Singularity in the right, hath ruined many: happy those who are convinced of the general Opinion.
  • Why does the blind man’s wife paint herself?

“The wit of conversation consists more in finding it in others, than shewing a great deal yourself. He who goes out of your company pleased with his own facetiousness and ingenuity, will the sooner come into it again. Most men had rather please than admire you and seek less to be instructed and diverted, than approved and applauded; and it is certainly the most delicate sort of pleasure, to please another. But that sort of wit, which employs itself insolently in criticizing and censuring the words and sentiments of others in conversation, is absolute folly; for it answers none of the needs of conversation. He who uses it neither improves others, is improved himself, or pleases any one.”

| Literature

Young American

Thomas Jefferson received the following letter on July 31, 1806:

To his Excelency Thomas Jefferson Esq.

Sir.

It is A Boy of 15 years Old Address to You the following lines. I feel A Strong regard for my Country’s welfair.

I think if I had A been Presendent at the time them opposen Set of People (I allude to the Brittish) appeared before Newyork I Should A been for rasing all the Naval force in the United States and opposed thire proceeding’s. My Father is an Englishman Born. Ever Sence I had an knowledge of Nation affaires I dispised them tirents as there are. I often read of the American War. I fear they Never will Come hear Again. I think if they Should I take up armes boy as I am in my Country’s Defence. If every one was as true to thier Country as me I think the Contest last war would not of been of so long Duration. Conquer or Die is my Wash Word.

A True American though a Youth

Huza to the Constetuon
Huza to the Repubeck
Huza Fredom Independence
Huza to all America.
PS. Sir Excuse the spelling.

| History · Society

Podcast Episode 2: Mass Hysteria, Airborne Sheepdogs and Mark Twain’s Brother

As skywatchers prepared for the return of Halley’s comet in 1910, they heard some alarming scientific predictions: Poisonous gases in the comet’s tail might “snuff out all life on the planet,” “leaving the burnt and drenched Earth no other atmosphere than the nitrogen now present in the air.” How should a responsible citizen evaluate a dire prediction by a minority of experts? In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we explore the Halley’s hysteria, remember the alarming predictions made for Y2K, and recall a forgotten novella in which Arthur Conan Doyle imagined a dead Earth fumigated by cosmic ether.

We also consider the odd legacy of an Australian prime minister who disappeared in 1967, investigate the role of balloon-borne sheepdogs during the Siege of Paris, learn why Mark Twain’s brother telegraphed the entire Nevada constitution to Washington D.C. in 1864, and offer a chance to win a book in the next Futility Closet Challenge.

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