Wei-Hwa Huang offered this brilliant crossword in the May 2008 issue of Word Ways:
Across
1 Sticks
6 Farm animals
7 Ogles
8 Leisure
9 Ride
Down
1 Soothe
2 Peaceful
3 Reserved
4 Untroubled
5 Pacify
Search Results for: in a word
Selflessness
Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:
She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.
She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”
The Clockwise Ant
A problem by Argentinian puzzlist Jaime Poniachik, from the February 1992 issue of Games magazine:
An ant crawls onto a clock face at the 6 mark just as the minute hand is passing 12. She begins crawling counterclockwise around the face’s circumference at a uniform speed. When the minute hand passes her, she reverses course and crawls clockwise without changing her speed. Forty-five minutes after her first encounter with the minute hand, it passes her a second time and she departs. How much time did she spend on the clock face?
A Near Thing
A memorably creepy ghost story is told of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava:
One night when Lord Dufferin had accepted, in Ireland, the hospitality of a friend, he awakened suddenly, preyed upon by an indefinable restlessness. He got up, went to the window, which was lighted by the moon, and saw distinctly in the shadow below him a man bearing a large burden on his shoulder. This man was walking slowly. When he passed before the house, it became manifest that he bore a coffin; he lifted his head; his face was so repulsive that Lord Dufferin was greatly struck. His gaze followed the apparition as it drew away, and he went back to bed, where he had great difficulty in going to sleep once more.
The morning of the next day, he questioned his host, but the latter could give him no enlightenment. He knew no one corresponding to the description of the person carrying the coffin, and no burial was awaited in the village.
Some years later Lord Dufferin was appointed Ambassador to France. Determined faithfully to discharge the duties of his high position, he went, one day, to a diplomatic reception that was to be held in the Grand Hotel in Paris. His private secretary conducted him to a large lift before which there were several state officials standing respectfully in line. Lord Dufferin, passing them, bowed, and was about to step into the lift, when he gave an involuntary start. The employee who operated the cable was ugly, surly-looking, and had precisely the features of the mysterious apparition of the Irish village!
Moved by an instinctive impulse, the ambassador drew back; he retraced his steps, uttering some words of excuse, and, on the pretext that he had forgotten something, asked them to take up those who had gone on before, without waiting for him; he then went to the hotel office to make inquiries as to the person who had caused his very natural emotion. But he did not have time. At that moment a terrible crash was heard, mingled with cries of anguish. The lift, reaching a certain height, had dropped suddenly to the bottom of the shaft, crushing or mutilating those within it.
It appears that none of this is true — there was a lift accident in the Grand Hotel in 1878, but that was years before Dufferin arrived there, and the rest seems to have been made up. It’s such a striking story, though, that Dufferin himself used to relate it as a personal anecdote.
A Second Act
Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust contains a character named Homer Simpson:
Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile.
In a 2012 interview with Smithsonian, Matt Groening said, “I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ — I just went with it.”
Quite a Dedication
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.”
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.)
Square Deal
From the Fall 1983 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, a wordless proof by Purdue University freshman Hao-Nhen Qua. Vu:
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?
“The Worst of All Puns”
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:
Decalogue
Jonathan Franzen’s “10 rules for novelists”:
- The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
- Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
- 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.
- Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
- When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
- The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
- You see more sitting still than chasing after.
- It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
- Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
- You have to love before you can be relentless.
(From The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, 2018.)