Search Results for: in a word

Apple Piety

But my favourite example is a story told by the American linguist Charles Hockett, who reports that at least one Filipino father, during the American occupation of the Philippines, named his son Ababís — after the patron saint of the United States. But no such saint exists. So what happened?

Well, before the Americans arrived, the Philippines were a Spanish colony, and Spanish was widely spoken. In Spanish, the word for ‘saint’, when it occurs in a male saint’s name, is San — hence all those California place names like San Francisco, San José and San Diego. The Filipino father had noticed that American soldiers, in moments of stress, tended to call upon their saint by exclaiming San Ababís! — or something like that.

— Robert Lawrence Trask, Language: The Basics, 1999

“I once had a student named Usmail, which I at first thought was some Hispanic version of Ishmael,” writes CUNY linguist Leonard R.N. Ashley. “It transpired that he had been named for the only contact his family in a remote Puerto Rican village enjoyed with the outside world, the red-white-and-blue truck that came frequently and had painted on its side US Mail.”

“In Nyasaland, Africa, a native tribe got into the custom of taking names from a publisher’s catalogue which had fallen into their hands. Their Chieftain took for himself the name of Oxford University Press.” — Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1966

| Language

Busy Man

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

When Saparmurat Niyazov became president of Turkmenistan, he commissioned a 12-meter gold-plated statue of himself that rotated always to face the sun. That was actually one of his more modest decrees. Others:

  • He had his parliament officially name him Turkmenbashi, “father of all Turkmens.”
  • He named streets, schools, airports, farms, and people after himself, as well as vodka, a meteorite, the country’s second largest city, and a television channel.
  • He banned the Hippocratic oath and demanded that doctors swear allegiance to him.
  • His autobiography, the Rukhnama (“book of souls”), was studied in schools and became a textbook in other subjects, such as history and geography. Libraries, now superfluous, were closed.
  • Gold-plated statues to him were erected throughout the country.
  • He banned ballet, opera, public smoking, lip syncing, beards, gold teeth, recorded music, health care in rural areas, and car radios.
  • He planned the construction of a “palace of ice” and penguin enclosure so that residents of the desert could learn to skate.
  • He decreed that the word old must not be applied to people — when one turns 61 he enters “the prophetic age,” and 73 marks “the inspired age.”
  • He applied the name Gurbansoltan Edzhe (“the Turkmen heroine”) to his mother, a women’s magazine, the year 2003, April, and bread.

“I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets,” he said, “but it’s what the people want.”

| Oddities

American Notes

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It must be confessed at the outset that Oshkosh is not a beautiful word. Its pronunciation is suggestive of a man struggling with a mouthful of hot mush, and to the irreverent it is a perfect rhyme to ‘gosh.’ But, on the other hand, the word has its advantages. It is an ideal word for advertising purposes. Once heard the word cannot be forgotten. Furthermore, to say that one comes from Oshkosh is in itself a mark of distinction. To be sure, few persons do come from Oshkosh. They are afraid of being made fun of, but when they do wander from the Oshkosh fireside, they attract as much attention as the pachyderm contingent of a circus parade. In a drawing-room the citizen from Oshkosh is the cynosure of all eyes, and he need fear but three rivals–the man from Kalamazoo, the man from Kokomo, and the man from Keokuk.

— Rochester Post Express, March 26, 1911

| Language

Robed Spite

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Supreme Court justice James Clark McReynolds (1862-1946) was known as “the rudest man in Washington.” In 27 years on the court, his behavior made this seem an understatement.

In choosing law clerks, McReynolds refused to accept “Jews, drinkers, blacks, women, smokers, married or engaged individuals.” A blatant antisemite, he refused to speak to Louis Brandeis, the court’s first Jewish justice, and in 1924 refused even to sit next to him for the court’s annual photo. After urging Herbert Hoover not to “afflict the Court with another Jew,” he pointedly read a newspaper during Benjamin Cardozo’s swearing-in ceremony. “For four thousand years,” he told Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the Lord tried to make something out of the Hebrews, then gave it up as impossible and turned them out to prey on mankind in general — like fleas on the dog, for example.”

McReynolds’ intolerance extended to everyone around him. When justice Harlan Fiske Stone remarked on the dullness of one attorney’s argument, McReynolds returned, “The only duller thing I can think of is to hear you read one of your opinions.” He objected to women’s wearing red nail polish and men’s wearing wristwatches, and he declared tobacco smoke “personally objectionable.” He once tried to defend his impartiality by saying he tried to protect “the poorest darkie in the Georgia backwoods as well as the man of wealth in a mansion on Fifth Avenue.”

Chief justice William Howard Taft called McReynolds “selfish to the last degree,” “fuller of prejudice than any man I have ever known,” and “one who delights in making others uncomfortable.” Even historians seem to hate him. In his biographical dictionary of the court, Timothy L. Hall calls McReynolds “the most boorish man ever to hold a seat there,” and Rebecca S. Shoemaker calls him “irascible and a racist.” He died alone at 84 — in Hall’s words, “unwept-for and unloved.”

| History

Beating the News

On Feb. 18, 1855, French-Canadian cattle dealer Louis Remme deposited $12,500 in gold in the Sacramento branch of the Adams & Company bank. Shortly afterward he received word that Page, Bacon & Company of St. Louis, the largest financial company west of the Alleghenies, had failed. He returned to the bank but it had already been liquidated, depleted by desperate depositors.

So Remme jumped on a horse and rode 665 miles north in 143 hours, including 10 hours of sleep and brief stops for food. He arrived in Portland, Ore., on Feb. 26, went straight to the Adams & Company bank, presented his certificate of deposit, and withdrew the $12,500. He had beaten the steamer that carried news of the bank’s failure — and Portland had no telegraph.

| Oddities

The Blank Column

A printer prints a sentence in a monospaced font. It inserts a space after the concluding period and then prints the same sentence again. It continues in this way until it has filled the page, running the sentences together into one long paragraph. The sentence is shorter than a full line, and no words are hyphenated. Prove that the finished page will always include a full column of blank spaces.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

A Novel Defense

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G stands for gnu,
Whose weapons of defense
Are long, sharp, curling horns, and common sense.
To these he adds a name so short and strong,
That even hardy Boers pronounce it wrong.
How often on a bright autumnal day
The pious people of Pretoria say,
“Come, let us hunt the–” Then no more is heard
But sounds of strong men struggling with a word.
Meanwhile, the distant gnu with grateful eyes
Observes his opportunity and flies.

— Hilaire Belloc

| Poems

A Matter of Interpretation

A French gentleman made a will in which, among other bequests, he left handsome sums of money to his two nephews, Charles and Henri. The sums were equal in amount. When the testator died and the will came to be proved, the nephews expected to receive two hundred thousand francs each as their specific bequests. But the executors disputed this, and said that each legacy was for one hundred thousand francs.

The legatees pointed to the word deux.

‘No,’ said the executors, ‘there is a comma or apostrophe between the d and the e, making it d’eux.’

‘Not so,’ rejoined Charles and Henri; ‘that is only a little blot of ink, having nothing to do with the actual writing.’

Let us put the two interpretations in juxtaposition:

À chacun deux cent milles francs.
À chacun d’eux cent milles francs.

The first form means, ‘To each two hundred thousand francs,’ whereas the other has the very different meaning, ‘To each of them a hundred thousand francs.’ This little mark (‘) made all the difference.

The paper had been folded before the ink was dry. A few spots of ink had been transposed from one side of the fold to the other, and the question was whether the apparent or supposed apostrophe was one such spot.

The legatees had very strong reasons–two hundred thousand strong–for wishing that the little spot of ink should be proved merely a blot; but their opponents had equally strong reasons for wishing that the blot should be accepted as an apostrophe, an intended and component element in the writing.

The decision was in favor of the legatees, but was only reached after long and expensive litigation.

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Society

The Unseen Gardener

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Two people return to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants.’ Upon inquiry they find that no neighbour has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. The first man says to the other, ‘He must have worked while people slept.’ The other says, ‘No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds.’ The first man says, ‘Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that someone comes, someone invisible to mortal eyes. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this.’ They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting that a gardener comes and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully, they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says, ‘I still believe a gardener comes’ while the other says, ‘I don’t,’ their different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, no difference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further and no difference about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. … What is the difference between them?

— John Wisdom, “Gods,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1944

Antony Flew asks, “Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”

| Religion

The Next War

In September 1918, during the closing months of World War I, Everybody’s Magazine published a prophetic article by Eugene P. Lyle. “The War of 1938” (subtitled “A Terrible Warning Against a Premature Peace”) depicted a future in which the war-weary Allies accepted a peace offer in 1918 rather than pressing the conflict to a decisive victory.

In Lyle’s vision, Germany disarms and pays reparations but immediately begins planning a Prussian “night of consummation.” Her freed merchant fleet begins gathering material with the slogan “Germany must not be merely efficient, but self-sufficient,” and in 1938, at the end of a 20-year debt moratorium, she unleashes a blitzkrieg that sweeps Europe. England is stormed from the air, and her overseas dominions and the United States await a final onslaught in Egypt and India. The article ends:

In all the wretched lexicon of regret there is no word more futile than the ghastly word ‘if.’ It avails nothing, ever, and yet tonight the word is branded deep on the aching heart of humanity — ‘IF we had only seen the thing through in 1918!’

Readers called Lyle an “irresponsible alarmist,” a “sensation monger,” and a muckraker, but many of his fears would be realized. A few years after the armistice Pershing remarked to a friend, “They don’t know they were beaten in Berlin, and it will all have to be done all over again.”

| History