Search Results for: in a word

Footloose

A visitor’s description of William Kingston, a Somerset farmer born without arms, recounted in John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876:

He highly entertained us at breakfast, by putting his half-naked feet upon the table as he sat, and carrying his tea and toast between his great and second toe to his mouth, with as much facility as if his foot had been a hand, and his toes fingers. … He then shewed me how he shaves himself with the razor in his toes; and he can comb his own hair. He can dress and undress himself, except buttoning his clothes. He feeds himself, and can bring both his meat or his broth to his mouth, by holding the fork or spoon in his toes. He cleans his own shoes, lights the fire, and does almost any domestic business as well as any other man. … He can milk his cows with his toes, and cuts his own hay, binds it up in bundles, and carries it about the field for his cattle. Last winter he had eight heifers constantly to fodder. The last summer he made all his hay-ricks. He can do all the business of the hay-field (except mowing) as fast and as well with his feet as others can with rakes and forks. … In a word, he can nearly do as much without as others can with their arms.

| Oddities

Homage à Fromage

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DoubleGlou.png

For his 1992 palindrome dictionary From A to ZOtamorf, Stephen J. Chism set out to gather all the reversible expressions in English that had been published up to that point. He divides them sensibly into single words; phrases and sentences; poems; and personal and place names — but the last chapter is titled FOR SOME REASON CHEESE:

A duo Gouda
Ate Feta?
Cheese not dairy. Myriad tone? See H.C.
Cheese? See H.C. …
Disk Colby block, Sid.
Edam Hannah made
He ate feta, eh?
He made lives evil. Edam, eh?
Lay block Colby, Al.
No Brie, Irbon?
No Romano on a moron …
Not Lit, Stilton?
Note Siwss: “I.W. Seton”
Why block Colby, H.W.?

“I don’t propose to explain it,” he writes. “Cheese is as unlikely as it is likely; a seemingly ordinary food product. Why, then, do we find it treated more thoroughly in palindromes than any other substance?”

| Language

Plunges in Dumbness

In his adopted home of Majorca, Robert Graves once encountered a memorable tourist leaflet:

They are hollowed out in the see coast at the municipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called ‘The Spider’ There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their eulogy about, included Nort-American geoglogues

He commemorated it with a poem:

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops
While all admit their impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the strength of water drops

The whole thing is here.

| Language · Poems

Ah

A reader nicknamed MANX submitted this poser to The Enigma, the magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League, in September 1985.

The letters in BENEATH CHOPIN can be rearranged into a fitting three-word phrase of 3, 5, and 5 letters. What is it?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Cut Spelling

Devised by English orthographer Christopher Upward, Cut Spelling seeks to reform English by eliminating and substituting letters to better match the spoken word:

Wen readrs first se Cut Spelng, as in this sentnce, they ofn hesitate slytly, but then quikly becom acustmd to th shortnd words and soon find text in Cut Spelng as esy to read as traditional orthografy, but it is th riter ho realy apreciates th advantajs of Cut Spelng, as many of th most trublsm uncertntis hav been elimnated.

Words in this scheme are 8 to 15 percent shorter than their standard spellings, and the rules are more systematic, arguably making them easier to learn for both newcomers and established readers. The plan was promoted for a time by the Simplified Spelling Society but, like so many other reform proposals, never achieved wide acceptance.

| Language

Details

As the U.S. tariff act of June 6, 1872, was being drafted, planners intended to exempt “Fruit plants, tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

Unfortunately, as the language was being copied, a comma was inadvertently moved one word to the left, producing the phrase “Fruit, plants tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

Importers pounced, claiming that the new phrase exempted all tropical and semi-tropical fruit, not just the plants on which it grew.

The Treasury eventually had to agree that this was indeed what the language now said, opening a loophole for fruit importers that deprived the U.S. government of an estimated $1 million in revenue. Subsequent tariffs restored the comma to its intended position.

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