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Mixed Media

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nabokov%27s_butterfly_crossword.jpg

Vladimir Nabokov composed this puzzle for his wife Véra in 1926. The title, “Crestos lovitxa Sirin,” roughly means “Nabokov’s crossword”: krestlovitska approximates the Russian kreslovitsa, “cross” plus “words”, and Sirin is a pseudonym Nabokov often used, a reference to the creatures of Russian mythology. The upper half of each wing contains the grid, the lower the clues.

Nabokov, a trained entomologist, had published the first crossword in Russian two years earlier. Forty years later, in the Paris Review, he likened writing a novel to creating a crossword: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose.”

(Adrienne Raphel, The Crossword Mentality in Modern Literature and Culture, dissertation, Harvard University, 2018.)

| Literature

Associate Degrees

In 1988, traversing synonyms in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, A. Ross Eckler found his way from TRUE to FALSE:

TRUE-JUST-FAIR-BEAUTIFUL-PRETTY-ARTFUL-ARTIFICIAL-SHAM-FALSE

He found his way back again by a different route:

FALSE-UNWISE-FOOLISH-SIMPLE-UNCONDITIONAL-ABSOLUTE-POSITIVE­-REAL-GENUINE-TRUE

He was using the dictionary’s ninth edition; see the article below for his conventions regarding qualifying synonyms. Two more examples:

BAD-POOR-MEAN-PENURIOUS-STINGY-CLOSE-SECRET-FURTIVE-SLY-CUNNING-CLEVER-GOOD

GOOD-CLEVER-CUNNING-SLY-FURTIVE-SECRET-TICKLISH-CRITICAL-ACUTE-SHARP-HARSH-ROUGH-INDELICATE-INDECOROUS-IMPROPER-INCORRECT-WRONG-SINFUL-WICKED-EVIL-BAD

LIGHT-BRIGHT-CLEVER-CUNNING-SLY-FURTIVE-SECRET-HIDDEN-OBSCURE-DARK

DARK-OBSCURE-VAGUE-VACANT-EMPTY-FOOLISH-SIMPLE-EASY-LIGHT

Somewhat related: Lewis Carroll invented word ladders, in which one transforms one word into another by changing one letter at a time:

COLD-CORD-WORD-WARD-WARM

Each intermediate step must itself be an English word. Donald Knuth once used a computer to find links among 5,757 common five-letter English words. 671 of these, he found, were not connected to any other word in the collection. These he dubbed “aloof” — and noted that ALOOF itself is such a word.

(A. Ross Eckler, “Websterian Synonym Chains,” Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 100-101.)

| Language

The Arc of Narrative

In 2020, three researchers from UT Austin and Lancaster University examined 40,000 fictional narratives and discovered a consistent linguistic pattern. Articles and prepositions such as a and the are common at the start of a story, where they set the stage by providing information about people, places, and things. As the plot progresses, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and pronouns become more common — words that are action-oriented and social. Near the end, “cognitive tension words” such as think, realize, and because become more common, words that reflect people trying to make sense of their world.

These patterns are consistent across novels, short stories, and amateur (“off-the-cuff”) stories. “If we want to connect with an audience, we have to appreciate what information they need, but don’t yet have,” said lead author Ryan Boyd. “At the most fundamental level, humans need a flood of ‘logic language’ at the beginning of a story to make sense of it, followed by a rising stream of ‘action’ information to convey the actual plot of the story.”

At this website you can view the graphs produced by various example narratives and even analyze your own.

(Ryan L. Boyd, Kate G. Blackburn, and James W. Pennebaker, “The Narrative Arc: Revealing Core Narrative Structures Through Text Analysis,” Science Advances 6:32 [2020], eaba2196.) (Thanks, Sharon.)

| Literature · Science & Math

“A Square Poem”

This poem, by Lewis Carroll, can be read line by line in the conventional way, but the same text results when it’s scanned “downward” in columns, reading the first word of each of the six lines, then the second, and so on:

I           often     wondered    when     I         cursed

Often       feared    where       I        would     be --

Wondered    where     she'd       yield    her       love,

When        I         yield,      so       will      she.

I           would     her         will     be        pitied!

Cursed      be        love!       She      pitied    me ...
| Language · Poems

Roundup

Obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, from a Word Ways article in November 1988:

agroof: face downward
amphoric: resembling the sound produced by blowing into a bottle
benedict: an apparently confirmed bachelor who marries
bort: the fragments removed from diamonds in cutting
callipygian: having shapely buttocks
charette: a period of intense group work to meet a deadline
clishmaclaver: gossip
crepitaculum: the rattle of a rattlesnake
famulus: a magician’s assistant
favonian: like the west wind; mild
formication: the feeling that ants are creeping over one’s skin
fucivorous: subsisting on seaweed
genethliacon: a birthday ode
gobemouche: one who believes everything he is told; literally, “one who swallows flies”
Grimthorpe: to restore a building badly
illth: the reverse of wealth: ill-being
kittly-benders: thin ice that bends under one’s weight
nevermas: a time or date that never comes
nixie: a piece of mail that can’t be delivered because it’s illegibly or incorrectly addressed
quavery-mavery: in an uncertain position
supermuscan: greater than that which is typical of a fly

Albert gives his sources in the article, but I find all the words above in the Oxford English Dictionary.

| Language

Around the World

Paris newspapers once carried an ad offering a cheap and pleasant way of travelling for the price of 25 centimes. Several simpletons mailed this sum. Each received a letter of the following content:

‘Sir, rest at peace in bed and remember that the earth turns. At the 49th parallel — that of Paris — you travel more than 25,000 km a day. Should you want a nice view, draw your curtain aside and admire the starry sky.’

The man who sent these letters was found and tried for fraud. The story goes that after quietly listening to the verdict and paying the fine demanded, the culprit struck a theatrical pose and solemnly declared, repeating Galileo’s famous words: ‘It turns.’

— Yakov Perelman, Physics for Entertainment, 1913

| Hoaxes · Science & Math

Endangered Species

Kevin Purbhoo invented this vivid puzzle while a student at Northern Secondary School in Toronto:

On a remote Norwegian mountain top, there is a huge checkerboard, 1000 squares wide and 1000 squares long, surrounded by steep cliffs to the north, south, east, and west. Each square is marked with an arrow pointing in one of the eight compass directions, so (with the possible exception of some squares on the edges) each square has an arrow pointing to one of its eight nearest neighbors. The arrows on squares sharing an edge differ by at most 45 degrees. A lemming is placed randomly on one of the squares, and it jumps from square to square following the arrows. Prove that the poor creature will eventually plunge from a cliff to its death.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Rivers

https://books.google.com/books?id=mE6BFXd6ppsC&pg=PA426

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them.

In ordinary text long rivers are unlikely, but in 1988 Mark Isaak found the 12-line example above on page 277 of the Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (squint to see it).

Fritzi Striebel offered a small collection of unusual rivers at the end of this article in the May 1986 issue of Word Ways.

| Literature · Technology