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Fenetix

A “sonic alphabet” composed by Harry Mathews:

Hay, be seedy! He-effigy, hate-shy jaky yellow man, O peek! You are rusty, you’ve edible, you ex-wise he!

Read it aloud. In 1886, J.H. Lundgren composed this sentence for Notes and Queries:

Oh Ellen, pea jay, ivy effigy, double you are! empty essay! why? you see age decay; be excused!

“It will be observed that the actual sounds (names) of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet are here represented by the several syllables of the eighteen words employed, and with the exception of ‘age’ for H, almost correctly. A perfectly faultless rendering may perhaps not be attainable.”

| Language

“Strange Instance of Sympathy”

The Duke de Saint Simon mentions in his ‘Memoirs’ a singular instance of constitutional sympathy between two brothers. These were twins — the President de Banquemore and the Governor de Bergues, who were surprisingly alike, not only in their persons, but in their feelings. One morning, he tells us, when the president was at his royal audience, he was suddenly attacked by an intense pain in the thigh; at the same instant, as it was discovered afterwards, his brother, who was with the army, received a severe wound from a sword on the same leg, and precisely the same part of the leg.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

| Oddities

“Ough”

As a farmer was going to plough,
He met a man driving a cough;
They had words which led to a rough,
And the farmer was struck on his brough.

One day when the weather was rough,
An old lady went for some snough,
Which she thoughtlessly placed in her mough,
And it got scattered, all over her cough.

While a baker was kneading his dough,
A weight fell down on his tough,
When he suddenly exclaimed ough!
Because it had hurt him sough.

There was a hole in the hedge to get through,
It was made by no one knew whough;
In getting through a boy lost his shough,
And was quite at a loss what to dough.

A poor old man had a bad cough,
To a doctor he straight went ough,
The doctor did nothing but scough,
And said it was all fancy, his cough.

— Anonymous, cited in Carolyn Wells, A Whimsey Anthology, 1906

| Language · Poems

Five Down

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:American_crossword.png

In May 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Europe, the word UTAH appeared in a crossword puzzle in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Security officers found that a bit worrisome: Utah was the code name for one of the landing beaches.

Their worry turned to alarm when OMAHA and MULBERRY, two further code names, appeared in subsequent puzzles. And alarm turned to panic when NEPTUNE and OVERLORD appeared four days before the planned invasion. In Allied code, Neptune referred to the landing operation, Overlord to the entire invasion of Normandy. The government immediately arrested Leonard Dawe, the schoolteacher who had composed the puzzles.

A long interrogation ensued, but in the end they decided Dawe was innocent. Apparently his students had overheard troops using these words and then repeated them in his hearing. If that’s true, the published words were in fact code names — but no one involved had recognized them as such.

| History

Here … Kitty

In July 1891, lightning struck the house of a Mr. Arent S. Vandyck of New Salem, Vt. He submitted this account to a Boston newspaper:

Suddenly the younger Mr. Vandyck [his son] pointed to an old-fashioned sofa. Upon it lay what was apparently the silver image of a cat curled up in an exceedingly comfortable position. Each glittering hair was separate and distinct, and each silvery bristle of the whiskers described a graceful curve as in life. Father and son turned towards the sword which hung upon the wall just above the sofa and there saw that the sword had been stripped of all its silver. The hilt was gone, and the scabbard was but a strip of blackened steel. The family cat had been electroplated by lightning.

Draw your own conclusions.

| Oddities

“Australia’s Titanic”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waratah1909.jpg

Engineer Claude Sawyer left the Australian steamer Waratah when it docked in Durban in July 1909. He said he’d seen a vision of a man “with a long sword in a peculiar dress. He was holding the sword in his right hand, and it was covered in blood.”

The Waratah left for Cape Town carrying 211 passengers. It was never seen again.

| Oddities

“An Alphabetical Wooing”

Let others talk of L N’s eyes,
And K T’s figure light and free,
Say L R, too, is beautiful —
I heed them not while U I C.
U need not N V them, for U
X L them all, my M L E.
I have no words when I would tell
How much in love with U I B.
So sweet U R, my D R E,
I love your very F E G;
And when you speak or sign, your voice
Is like a winsome L O D.
When U R I C, hope D K’s,
I am a mere non- N T T.
Such F E K C has your smile,
It shields from N E N M E.
For love so deep as mine, I fear,
There is no other M E D.
But that you love me back again —
O, thought of heavenly X T C;
So, lest my M T heart and I
Should sing for love an L E G,
T’s me no more — B Y’s, B kind,
O, M L E, U R, I C!

— Anonymous, cited in Carolyn Wells, A Whimsey Anthology, 1906

| Language · Poems

Back and Forth

Most people think of palindromes as being symmetrical arrangements of letters:

SIT ON A POTATO PAN, OTIS.

But they can also work at the level of individual words:

FALL LEAVES AFTER LEAVES FALL.

YOU CAN CAGE A SWALLOW, CAN’T YOU, BUT YOU CAN’T SWALLOW A CAGE, CAN YOU?

And even phonetically: The Hungarian phrase a bátya gatyába (“the brother in underpants”) and the Japanese ta-ke-ya-bu ya-ke-ta (“a bamboo grove has been burned”) (both transliterated here) sound the same when reversed.

Bonus palindrome, by Stephen Fry:

RETTEBS IFLAHD NOCES, EH? TTU, BUT THE SECOND HALF IS BETTER.

| Language

Finding Religion

Here are the first three verses of Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Pick any word in the first verse, count its letters, and move ahead by the corresponding number of words. For example, if you start at beginning, you’d count 9 letters and move ahead 9 words, landing on the in the second verse. Count that word’s letters and continue in this manner until you’ve entered the third verse.

You’ll always arrive at God.

(Discovered by Martin Gardner.)

| Language · Oddities · Religion