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Group Study

A Frenchman, while looking at a number of vessels, exclaimed, ‘See what a flock of ships!’ He was told that a flock of ships was called a fleet, but that a fleet of sheep was called a flock. To assist him in mastering the intricacies of the English language, he was told that a flock of girls was called a bevy, that a bevy of wolves is called a pack, but that a pack of cards is never called a bevy, though a pack of thieves is called a gang, and a gang of angels is called a host, while a host of porpoises is termed a shoal. He was told that a host of oxen is termed a herd, and a herd of children is called a troop, and a troop of partridges is termed a covey, and a covey of beauty is called a galaxy, and a galaxy of ruffians is called a horde, and a horde of rubbish is called a heap, and a heap of bullocks is called a drove, and a drove of blackguards is called a mob, and a mob of whales is called a school, and a school of worship is called a congregation, and a congregation of engineers is called a corps, and a corps of robbers is called a band, and a band of locusts is called a crowd, and a crowd of gentlefolks is called the elite. The last word being French, the scholar understood it and asked no more.

— Charles William Bardeen, A System of Rhetoric, 1884

| Language

The Uninvited Guest

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A conundrum by John F. Collins, from the August 1968 issue of Word Ways:

Just then, someone came up from behind and put his hands over the Hatter’s eyes.

‘Guess who!’ said the newcomer in a thin, flat voice.

The Hatter froze for a moment and declared, rather coldly, ‘I have no use for practical jokers.’

‘Ha! Neither have I,’ retorted the stranger, still keeping his hands over the Hatter’s eyes.

At that, the Hatter seemed to accept the challenge of the game and started asking a series of questions in a manner that mingled hope with care.

Question: ‘Ahem. Would you, by chance, be in a black suit this evening?’

Answer: ‘I would, but not by chance, by design.’

Q. ‘I presume you’re a member of all the posh clubs?’

A. ‘Afraid not. Never even been invited.’

Q. ‘Surely you’re better than average?’

A. ‘Yes, indeed!’

Q. ‘Not spotted, I hope?’

A. ‘Knock wood.’

Q. ‘Married?’

A. ‘No, happy.’

Who is behind the Mad Hatter?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Sotto Voce

‘Wordsworth,’ said Charles Lamb, ‘one day told me that he considered Shakespeare greatly overrated. “There is an immensity of trick in all Shakespeare wrote,” he said, “and people are taken in by it. Now if I had a mind I could write exactly like Shakespeare.” So you see,’ proceeded Charles Lamb quietly, ‘it was only the mind that was wanting.’

— Frank Leslie’s Ten Cent Monthly, December 1863

| Literature

To Do

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While editing The Sun Also Rises, Maxwell Perkins had to decide how to handle the many obscenities in Hemingway’s text. He planned a lunch with the author and kept a list of words to discuss with him.

While Perkins was at lunch, Charles Scribner came looking for him and, finding his office empty, consulted his calendar. It read “shit piss fuck bitch.”

When Perkins returned, Scribner said, “You must be exhausted.”

| Literature

Nearer My God

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Buzz Aldrin celebrated communion on the moon. From his 2009 book Magnificent Desolation:

So, during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.’ I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: ‘I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.’ I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.

“Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion,” he wrote. “Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind — be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience that by giving thanks to God.”

| History · Religion

Mailbag

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To the Editor of the Herald:

I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice versa. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on the centigrade thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit’s thermometer.

Old Philadelphia Lady
Paris, December 24, 1899

That’s reasonable enough, right? It ran in the Paris Herald on Dec. 27, 1899.

The curious thing is that it also ran on Dec. 28, and Dec. 29 … and every day thereafter for 18 years, a total of 6,718 times.

Publisher James Gordon Bennett never gave a reason — he only told colleague James B. Townsend that “just so long as there was an average income of jocose but more often indignant and abusive letters about this letter at the Paris Herald office he would continue to publish it.”

| Oddities

“The Story of Esaw Wood”

Esaw Wood sawed wood.

Esaw Wood would saw wood!

All the wood Esaw Wood saw Esaw Wood would saw. In other words, all the wood Esaw saw to saw Esaw sought to saw.

Oh, the wood Wood would saw! And oh, the wood-saw with which Wood would saw wood.

But one day Wood’s wood-saw would saw no wood, and thus the wood Wood sawed was not the wood Wood would saw if Wood’s wood-saw would saw wood.

Now, Wood would saw wood with a wood-saw that would saw wood, so Esaw sought a saw that would saw wood.

One day Esaw saw a saw saw wood as no other wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood.

In fact, of all the wood-saws Wood ever saw saw wood Wood never saw a wood-saw that would saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood would saw wood, and I never saw a wood-saw that would saw as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw until I saw Esaw Wood saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.

Now Wood saws wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.

Oh, the wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw!

Oh, the wood Wood’s woodshed would shed when Wood would saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood!

Finally, no man may ever know how much wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw, if the wood-saw Wood saw would saw all the wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw.

— W.E. Southwick

Anthologist Carolyn Wells writes, “Well, you don’t have to read it.”

| Language · Poems

No, No, No

The New York Times ran a bewildering headline on May 6, 1965:

“Albany Kills Bill to Repeal Law Against Birth Control”

… a triple (quadruple?) negative.

“As you leave the town of Franklin, Pennsylvania, you encounter a sign: END BRAKE RETARDER PROHIBITION,” notes Edward Wolpow in the May 2011 issue of Word Ways. “For those for whom this is relevant, they are, presumably, able to follow the instructions quite quickly, since it is, after all, a road sign. But I still can’t figure it.”

In a 1975 interview with Business Week, Henry Kissinger said, “I am not saying that there’s no circumstances where we would not use force” against Saudi Arabia. Is this what he meant to say?

At a New York conference of linguistic philosophers in the 1950s, Oxford professor J.L. Austin noted that while a double negative often expresses a positive — as in “not unattractive” — there is no example in English of a double positive expressing a negative.

Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who was in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah …”

| Language

Mathematicians’ Graves

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Archimedes wanted no other epitaph than a sphere inscribed within a cylinder — he had determined the sphere’s relative volume and considered this his greatest achievement.

Henry Perigal’s tomb in Essex displays his graphic proof of the Pythagorean theorem (left).

Gauss wanted to be buried under a heptadecagon, which he’d shown can be constructed with compass and straightedge. (The stonemason demurred, fearing he’d produce only a circle.)

And Jakob Bernoulli opted for a logarithmic spiral and the words Eadem mutata resurgo—the motto means “I shall arise the same though changed.”

| Death · Science & Math