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

Quite a Dedication

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Aplauzos_academicos_e_rella%C3%A7a%C3%B5_do_feli/bjVmAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=RA1-PA195&printsec=frontcover

This diagram appears in a 1673 Portuguese composition inscribed to the Conde de Villaflor. The title explains, “Each circle is a verse, each verse two anagrams. The letters are composed by the numbers and the numbers by the letter, on the periphery of this globe.”

Ana Hatherly explains:

Following the instructions we can read around the outer circle the words ‘DOM SANCHO MANOEL.’ To each of the letters of this name a number is attributed, so that we have the numbers from 1 to 15, corresponding to the letters over which they are placed. In the inner circles those numbers are to be retranslated into letters and, if the reader does so, he will decipher the riddle and end up with the announced sonnet, in which the name DOM SANCHO MANOEL is found in an acrostic and in the twenty-eight anagrams (two in each line) formed by the combination of letters in those words.

Hatherly, a professor of Baroque literature at UC Berkeley, discovered the solution in an 18th-century manuscript:

D
O Onde nam macho o sol o sol manchandome;
M mancha nem dolo so nem sol mo achando:
S sol como de manhan nam escolho, mando:
A achem. Mando no sol Solon chamandome
N Nome mancha do sol no cham. Sol andome
C chamando sol nem o encham o sol. Mando
H homem os do cannal nos mostre chamando
O oh do mesmo cannal com al sonhandome,
M Mancha medo no sol, sol nam, chamo onde
A achem damno no sol, nem sol chamando
N nam ilho escondam o sol, nome dam ancho
O Onde o sol mancham, mal o sol ham conde
E echo nam dam no sol em sol manchando
L lem coando sonham no Leam Dom Sancho.

(From Merald E. Wrolstad and Dick Higgins, Visible Language, 1986.)

| Language

Charlie’s Birthday

A puzzle by National Security Agency mathematician Stephen C., from the agency’s July 2015 Puzzle Periodical:

Charlie presents a list of 14 possible dates for his birthday to Albert, Bernard, and Cheryl.

  • Apr 14, 1999
  • Feb 19, 2000
  • Mar 14, 2000
  • Mar 15, 2000
  • Apr 16, 2000
  • Apr 15, 2000
  • Feb 15, 2001
  • Mar 15, 2001
  • Apr 14, 2001
  • Apr 16, 2001
  • May 14, 2001
  • May 16, 2001
  • May 17, 2001
  • Feb 17, 2002

He then announces that he is going to tell Albert the month, Bernard the day, and Cheryl the year.

After he tells them, Albert says, “I don’t know Charlie’s birthday, but neither does Bernard.”

Bernard then says, “That is true, but Cheryl also does not know Charlie’s birthday.”

Cheryl says, “Yes, and Albert still has not figured out Charlie’s birthday.”

Bernard then replies, “Well, now I know his birthday.”

At this point, Albert says, “Yes, we all know it now.”

What is Charlie’s birthday?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“The Worst of All Puns”

https://blog.le-miklos.eu/wp-content/HabeMortemPraeOcculis.jpg

At Nuremburg a wolf’s tooth was shown to travellers … on which an Abbé is represented lying dead in a meadow, with three lilies growing out of his posteriors. This is not only the worst pun that ever was carved upon a wolf’s tooth, but the worst that ever was or will be made. The Abbé is designed to express the Latin word Habe. He is lying dead in a meadow, … mort en pré; this is for mortem præ; and the three lilies in his posteriors are to be read oculis, … au cu lis. Thus, according to the annexed explanation, the whole pun, rebus, or hieroglyphic, is Habe mortem præ oculis.

— Robert Southey, Omniana, 1812

In other words, the French phrase Abbé mort en pré au cul lys (“Abbot died in a meadow with lilies in his rump”) sounds like the Latin phrase Habe mortem præ oculis (“Keep death before your eyes”). This joke appears to be referenced in Hieronymus Bosch’s 1504 triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Garden_of_earthly_delights.jpg

| Art · Humor · Language · Oddities

Decalogue

Jonathan Franzen’s “10 rules for novelists”:

  1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction — we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

(From The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, 2018.)

| Literature

Succinct

Travelling to England with his wife and daughter in the Norwegian freighter Halibut, which ran into rough seas, [Sir Robert Menzies] sent this cable to relatives:

At sea off Perth: Exodus X, 23.

In the Bible they found these words:

They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days.

— Ray Robinson, ed., The Wit of Sir Robert Menzies, 1966

| Humor · Religion

Viewpoints

https://archive.org/details/b28738196/page/n3/mode/2up

Jeremy Bentham made a table of the springs of action, where every human desire was named in three parallel columns, according as men wish to praise it, to blame it, or to treat it neutrally. Thus we find in one column ‘gluttony,’ and opposite it, in the next column, ‘love of the pleasures of the social board.’ And again, we find in the column giving eulogistic names to impulses, ‘public spirit,’ and opposite to it, in the next column, we find ‘spite.’ I recommend anybody who wishes to think clearly on any ethical topic to imitate Bentham in this particular, and after accustoming himself to the fact that almost every word conveying blame has a synonym conveying praise, to acquire a habit of using words that convey neither praise nor blame.

— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, 1929

Bentham had published the table in 1817. “By habit,” he wrote, “wherever a man sees a name, he is led to figure to himself a corresponding object, of the reality of which the name is accepted by him, as it were of course, in the character of a certificate. From this delusion, endless is the confusion, the error, the dissension, the hostility, that has been derived.”

| Society

Hot Woe!

A conversation in Spoonerian, a language conducted entirely in spoonerisms, proposed by J.A. Lindon:

A: Hot woe, Barley Chinks!
B: Hot woe, Chilly Base!
A: Blocking showy, Miss Thorning.
B: Glowing a bale.
A: It slacked one of my crates.
B: I’ve a late slacking. The drain rips in.
A: Porter on the willows? Tut-tut!
B: Mad for the bite. Cuddles on the pot.
A: A very washy splinter.
B: All blood and mowing.
A: Here’s to spray in the Ming!
B: Sadsome glummer! ‘Ware fell!
A: Low song!

| Language

A Late Edit

The screenplay for the 1962 war film The Longest Day was composed by an international team of writers to reflect the various nationalities that appear in the film. James Jones, who handled the Americans, had finished his work and was vacationing in Yugoslavia when producer Darryl Zanuck sent an urgent wire asking him to correct a small piece of late dialogue. “How much for it?” Jones asked. Zanuck answered “Fifteen thousand dollars.” Jones wrote, “Okay, shoot.”

The line, which had been written by an Englishman, was “I can’t eat that bloody old box of tunny fish.”

Jones changed this to “I can’t stand this damned old tuna fish.”

In The Literary Life and Other Curiosities, Robert Hendrickson calls this the highest word rate ever paid to a professional author. “The chore of deleting two words and changing four words came to $2,500 a word.”

| Entertainment · Language