If you rearrange the letters in WHAT IS THE MEANING OR PURPOSE OF LIFE?, you get WINNIE-THE-POOH, SUFFER PIGLET’S AROMA.
(Discovered by John Henrick, Word Ways, May 1989.)
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Limerick
Why Not?
From a letter from English scholar Walter Raleigh to Mrs. F. Gotch, July 2, 1898:
Doe you lyke my newe phansy in the matere of Spelynge? I have growen wery of Spelynge wordes allwaies in one waye and now affecte diversite. The cheif vertew of my reform is that it makes the spelynge express the moode of the wryter. Frinsns, if yew fealin frenly, ye kin spel frenly-like. Butte if yew wyshe to indicate that thogh nott of hyghe bloode, yew are compleately atte one wyth the aristokrasy you canne double alle youre consonnantts, prollonge mosstte of yourre vowelles, and addde a fynalle ‘e’ wherevverre itte iss reququirred.
A later poem:
Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!
The Territory
Much blood has … been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that could happen — but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen — though often you only wish that it could.
— Arthur C. Clarke, foreword, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, 2000
Board Walk
Al writes the numbers 1, 2, …, 2n on a blackboard, where n is an odd positive integer. He then picks any two numbers a and b, erases them, and writes instead |a – b|. He keeps doing this until one number remains. Prove that this number is odd.
Misc
- To burn up is to burn down.
- Litotes is an anagram of T.S. Eliot.
- 1012658227848 × 8 = 8101265822784
- Three U.S. presidents died on July 4.
- “Grasp the subject, the words will follow.” — Cato the Elder
Ironically Apt
In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg:
“I fly around on my awesome wings, patrolling supermarket showcases and kitchen refrigerators. I can talk to vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish and can check on their health! I was born in a Fukushima refrigerator! I love eating and I’m full of curiosity. I think of myself as kind, with a strong sense of justice, but my friends say I’m a bit of a klutz. But I’m always working hard to make myself shine!”
Unfortunately the company named the character “Fukuppy,” a combination of Fukushima and the English word happy.
After the name began to make news in English-speaking countries, Fukushima issued an apology and withdrew it.
Catastrophe
In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline:
ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER
Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out as in telegrams: ‘I will tell you for your penny about the Italian Assassin and the well-known Bomb Plot Disaster’; but the assassin, as far as I remember, was actually not an Italian; Italian refers to the whole aggregate, and its noun, if any, is disaster. Perhaps, by being so far separated from its noun, it gives the impression that the other words, too, are somehow connected with Italy; that bombs, plots, and disasters belong both to government and rebel in those parts; perhaps Italian Assassin is not wholly separate in one’s mind from the injured Mussolini.
In fact it’s not clear what the intended meaning had been. Empson says that the main rhythm conveys the sense “This is a particularly exciting sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy.” In The Wordsworth Book of Usage & Abusage (1995), Eric Partridge suggests that the writer may have meant ITALIAN DISASTER ASSASSIN’S BOMB-PLOT, “There has been in Italy a disaster caused by a bomb in an assassin’s plot.” But he agrees that “even after an exasperating amount of cogitation by the reader,” the meaning is unclear.
To the Point
In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”:
Madam,
We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on Tuesday next, the 14th inst., before 12 noon, which we trust will be convenient, after which our quotation will at once issue.
He reduces this to:
Madam,
We have your letter of May 9th requesting an estimate for the removal of your furniture and effects to Burbleton, and a man will call to see them next Tuesday forenoon if convenient, after which we will send the estimate without delay.
This shortens the letter from 66 words to 42. Then he cuts it again, to 35 words, or 157 letters against the original 294, a savings of nearly 50 percent:
Madam,
Thank you for your letter of May 9th. A man will call next Tuesday, forenoon, to see your furniture and effects, after which, without delay, we will send our estimate for their removal to Burbleton.
In a large firm, he estimates, cutting “verbose and indolent, obscure, inelegant, and time-devouring monkey-talk” could save a week’s work for two typists.
Elsewhere he considers a memo that reads “Hot-Water Bottles: With reference to the above matter I should like an opportunity of discussing same with you.” The improvement he suggests is “Could we, please, have a talk about Hot-Water Bottles?”
Cube Route
A centered hexagonal number is a number that can be represented by a hexagonal lattice with a dot in the center, like so:
Starting at the center, successive hexagons contain 1, 7, 19, and 37 dots. The sequence goes on forever.
The sum of the first n centered hexagonal numbers is n3, and there’s a pretty “proof without words” to show that this is so:
Instead of regarding each figure as a hexagon, think of it as a perspective view of a cube, looking down along a space diagonal. The first cube here contains a single dot. How many dots must we add to produce the next larger cube? Seven, and from our bird’s-eye perspective this pattern of 7 added dots matches the 7-dot hexagon shown above. The same thing happens when we advance to a 3×3×3 cube: This requires surrounding the 2×2×2 cube with 19 additional dots, and from our imagined vantage point these again take the form of a hexagonal lattice. In the last image our 33 cube must accrete another 37 dots to become a 43 cube … and the pattern continues.