In Vienna’s Judenplatz stands a construction of steel and concrete that takes the shape of a library turned inside out. Its walls are filled with books, but the spines are all turned inward, so the knowledge they contain is inaccessible. It bears two large doors, but these do not open.
It is a memorial to the Austrian victims of the Holocaust. Artist Rachel Whiteread said, “It was clear to me from the outset that my proposal had to be simple, monumental, poetic and non-literal. I am a sculptor: not a person of words but of images and forms.”
At the unveiling, Simon Wiesenthal said, “This monument shouldn’t be beautiful. It must hurt.”
In a speech class at Oregon State University in 1967, Charles Goetzinger arranged for one student to arrive covered with a large black bag. Only his bare feet showed. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 a.m., the student would sit on a table at the back of the room, rarely speaking or moving. Goetzinger knew the student’s identity, but none of the other 20 students did.
At first the students treated the bag with hostility, but this evolved into curiosity and even friendship. When another teacher disparaged the mysterious student, “It made me mad,” said a classmate. “I felt I had to protect him.”
The experiment is seen today as an example of the “mere-exposure effect,” the phenomenon that familiarity breeds preference. The students knew nothing about the man in the bag, but simply encountering him over and over disposed them to like him. In the words of social psychologist Robert Zajonc, “mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it.”
In a letter to a newspaper, one student wrote, “The Bag has motivated us, made us delve, explore, ponder and try to understand what goes on inside us. … Above all it has made us learn. It has persuaded us, and drastically changed everyone in the class.”
If there’s a sentence that’s guaranteed to be false in any context, surely it’s this:
“I am not here now.”
But this very phrase is played on millions of answering machines and voicemail systems every day, and we all understand it to be true. I, here, and now are indexicals, words whose meanings change with the circumstances of their utterance. Here each seems to make a rather uncertain reference, and the resulting sentence on its face cannot be true, yet we all understand it readily. How?
(Jonathan Cohen, “Indexicality and the Puzzle of the Answering Machine,” Journal of Philosophy 110:1 [2013], 5-32.)
In any language, the most frequently used word occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, and so on.
In American English text, the word the occurs most frequently, accounting for nearly 7% of all word occurrences. The second most frequent word, of, accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words, and so on.
This pattern obtains even in non-natural languages like Esperanto. It’s named for American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who popularized it.
12/24/2021 UPDATE: Apart from languages, the law is observed in measurements of the citations of scientific papers, web hits, copies of books sold, telephone calls, the magnitude of earthquakes, the diameter of moon craters, the intensity of solar flares, the intensity of wars, and the populations of cities. See this paper. (Thanks, Snehal.)
Thomas More’s Utopia gives us not only a description of that imaginary land but the actual alphabet used there: More’s friend Peter Giles wrote an addendum to the book that presents the letters and gives an example of the Utopian writing system:
Vtopos ha Boccas peu la chama polta chamaan.
Bargol he maglomi Baccan foma gymno sophaon.
Agrama gymnosophon labarembacha bodamilomin.
Voluala barchin heman la lauoluola dramme pagloni.
This is translated into Latin as
Utopus me dux ex non insula fecit insulam.
Una ego terrarum omnium absque philosophia
Civitatem philosophicam expressi mortalibus
Libenter impartio mea, non gravatim accipio meliora.
And in English this becomes
The commander Utopus made me into an island out of a non-island.
I alone of all nations, without philosophy,
Have portrayed for mortals the philosophical city.
Freely I impart my benefits; not unwillingly I accept whatever is better.
Working backward, this makes it possible to divine the meaning of a few Utopian words: boccas is commander, chama is island, voluala is willingly, and gymnosophaon is philosophy. You couldn’t really talk about much beyond perfect societies, but maybe that’s the point.
Just a charming little anecdote: When German chemist Adolf von Baeyer achieved a long-sought result, he tipped his hat to it:
Eventually, however, even Baeyer was supersaturated with these hydrogenations, and the sorely tried assistants hailed with deep relief the transference of his interest to succinylsuccinic ester and diketocyclohexane. By means of a dodge (‘Kunstgriff’) of which Baeyer was very proud (treatment with sodium amalgam in presence of sodium bicarbonate), the diketone was reduced to quinitol. At the first glimpse of the crystals of the new substance Baeyer ceremoniously raised his hat!
It must be explained here that the Master’s famous greenish-black hat plays the part of a perpetual epithet in Prof. Rupe’s narrative. As the celebrated sword-pommel to Paracelsus, so this romantic hard-hitter or ‘alte Melone’ to Baeyer: the former was said to contain the vital mercury of the mediaeval philosophers; the latter certainly enshrined one of the keenest chemical intellects of the modern world. … Baeyer’s head was normally covered. Only in moments of unusual excitement or elation did the Chef remove his hat: apart from such occasions his shiny pate remained in permanent eclipse.
(From his colleague John Read’s 1947 book Humour and Humanism in Chemistry.)
“Some of us wish to send you a word at this sad Christmastide,” it ran. “The Christmas message sounds like mockery to a world at war, but those of us who wished, and still wish, for peace may surely offer a solemn greeting to such of you who feel as we do.”
Though our sons are sent to slay each other, and our hearts are torn by the cruelty of this fate, yet through pain supreme we will be true to our common womanhood. We will let not bitterness enter into this tragedy, made sacred by the life-blood of our best, nor mar with hate the heroism of their sacrifice. Though much has been done on all sides you will, as deeply as ourselves, deplore — shall we not steadily refuse to give credence to those false tales so free told us, each of the other?
We hope it may lessen your anxiety to learn we are doing our utmost to soften the lot of your civilians and war prisoners within our shores, even as we rely on your goodness of heart to do the same for ours in Germany and Austria.
The following spring they received a reply:
If English women alleviated misery and distress at this time, relieved anxiety, and gave help irrespective of nationality, let them accept the warmest thanks of German women and the true assurance that they are and were prepared to do likewise. In war time we are united by the same unspeakable suffering of all nations taking part in the war. Women of all nations have the same love of justice, civilization and beauty, which are all destroyed by war. Women of all nations have the same hatred for barbarity, cruelty and destruction, which accompany every war.
Women, creators and guardians of life, must loathe war, which destroys life. Through the smoke of battle and thunder of cannon of hostile peoples, through death, terror, destruction, and unending pain and anxiety, there glows like the dawn of a coming better day the deep community of feeling of many women of all nations.
It was signed by 155 women of Germany and Austria.
In the “language of flowers,” a meaning is assigned to every flower in a bouquet, so that it’s possible to send a message to your beloved without saying a word. The trouble is that different dictionaries give different meanings. In Collier’s Cyclopedia of 1882, they get very specific:
American starwort: Cheerfulness in old age.
Apple (blossom): Fame speaks him great and good.
Balsam, red: Touch me not.
Bay leaf: I change but in death.
Bud of white rose: Heart ignorant of love.
Butterfly weed: Let me go.
Camellia japonica, red: Unpretending excellence.
Camomile: Energy in adversity.
Cape jasmine: I’m too happy.
Carnation, deep red: Alas! for my poor heart.
Chinese chrysanthemum: Cheerfulness under adversity.
Cistus, gum: I shall die tomorrow.
Citron: Ill-natured beauty.
Convolvulus: Worth sustained by judicious and tender affection.
Corchorus: Impatient of absence.
Damask rose: Brilliant complexion.
Geranium, lemon: Unexpected meeting.
Geranium, nutmeg: Expected meeting.
Helmet-flower: Knight-errantry.
Hemlock: You will be my death. [!]
Hundred-leaved rose: Dignity of mind.
Japan rose: Beauty is your only attraction.
Laurestina: I die if neglected.
Locust tree (green): Affection beyond the grave. [!]
Meadow saffron: My best days are past.
Mistletoe: I surmount difficulties.
Mourning bride: Unfortunate attachment. I have lost all.
Mulberry tree (black): I shall not survive you.
Persimmon: Bury me amid nature’s beauties.
Poppy, scarlet: Fantastic extravagance.
Rose, Christmas: Tranquilize my anxiety.
Rose, daily: Thy smile I aspire to.
Scarlet lychnis: Sunbeaming eyes.
Sorrel, wild: Wit ill-timed.
Spindle tree: Your charms are engraven on my heart.
Straw, broken: Rupture of a contract.
Tiger flower: For once may pride befriend me.
Virginian spiderwort: Momentary happiness.
Zinnia: Thoughts of absent friends.
“How charmingly a young gentleman can speak to a young lady, and with what eloquent silence in this delightful language. How delicately she can respond, the beautiful little flowers telling her tale in perfumed words; what a delicate story the myrtle or the rose tells!” But I think only florists could do this articulately.
Conductor and musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky composed a “Möbius Strip Tease” in 1965, while he was teaching at UCLA. The text reads:
Ach! Professor Möbius, glörious Möbius
Ach, we love your topological,
And, ach, so logical strip!
One-sided inside and two-sided outside!
Ach! euphörius, glörius Möbius Strip-Tease!
Slonimsky described the piece as “a unilateral perpetual rondo in a linearly dodecaphonic vertically consonant counterpoint.” The instructions on the score read: “Copy the music for each performer on a strip of 110-b card stock, 68″ by 6″. Give the strip a half twist to turn it into a Möbius strip.” In performance the endless score rotates perpetually around each musician’s head. (That’s Slonimsky above, trying it out with John Cage.)
The score is here if you’d like to try it yourself. Be careful.
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