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.
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
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.
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.)
January 11, 1613, some masons digging near the ruins of a castle in Dauphiné, in a field which (by tradition) had long been called the giant’s field, at the depth of eighteen feet discovered a brick tomb thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet high, on which was a gray stone, with the words Theutobochus Rex cut thereon; when the tomb was opened, they found a human skeleton entire, twenty-five feet and a half long, ten feet wide across the shoulders, and five feet deep from the breast-bone to the back, his teeth were each about the size of an ox’s foot, and his shin bone measured four feet.
— Kirby’s Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803
The longest English word in which no letter is repeated is uncopyrightable.
Do you see why that’s true?
The ‘Four-eyed Man of Cricklade’ was a celebrated English monstrosity of whom little reliable information is obtainable. He was visited by W. Drury, who is accredited with reporting the following–
‘So wondrous a thing, such a lusus naturae, such a scorn and spite of nature I have never seen. It was a dreadful and shocking sight.’ This unfortunate had four eyes placed in pairs, ‘one eye above the other and all four of a dull brown, encircled with red, the pupils enormously large.’ The vision in each organ appeared to be perfect. ‘He could shut any particular eye, the other three remaining open, or, indeed, as many as he chose, each several eye seeming to be controlled by his will and acting independently of the remainder. He could also revolve each eye separately in its orbit, looking backward with one and forward with another, upward with one and downward with another simultaneously.’ He was of a savage, malignant disposition, delighting in ugly tricks, teasing children, torturing helpless animals, uttering profane and blasphemous words, and acting altogether like the monster, mental and physical, that he was. ‘He could play the fiddle, though in a silly sort, having his notes on the left side, while closing the right pair of eyes. He also sang, but in a rough, screeching voice not to be listened to without disgust.’
— George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, 1896
In 1984, a pet kitten was given to Koko, the Stanford University gorilla who communicates through sign language.
She cared for it as a baby gorilla until December of that year, when the cat escaped from her cage and was run down by a car.
When her trainers told Koko what had happened, she gave the signs for two words.
They were “cry” and “sad.”
It’s been known since 1876 that 267-1 isn’t prime, but for decades no one knew what the factors were.
Then, at a meeting in 1903, mathematician Frank Nelson Cole gave an hourlong “lecture” in which he didn’t say a word. On one chalkboard he expanded the value of 267-1:
147,573,952,589,676,412,927
On another he wrote:
193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287
Then he multiplied those values by hand. The two boards matched. He had found the factors. Cole returned to his seat amid a standing ovation.
He later admitted that finding the factors had taken “three years of Sundays.”
Isaac Asimov proposed this mnemonic for a famous constant:
How I want a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Count the letters in each word and you’ll get 3.14159265358979.