Search Results for: in a word

Expedient

Captured by the North Vietnamese in 1965, Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was forced to participate in a propaganda interview to be broadcast in the United States. Pretending to be oppressed by the television lights, he blinked the word “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code — alerting U.S. Naval Intelligence for the first time that American prisoners were being tortured.

In his Investigator’s Guide to Steganography (2003), Gregory Kipper notes that captured soldiers would sometimes use hand signals to transmit messages during photo ops; “often, these gestures were airbrushed out by the media.”

| Language

Cryptarithm

A pleasing puzzle by Eric LeVasseur:

PI × R2 = AREA

If each letter in this expression (but not the exponent 2) is replaced with a corresponding digit, the resulting equation will be valid. What are the digits?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Misc

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  • It’s illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament wearing a suit of armor, according to a 1313 statute.
  • “All things in moderation” is an immoderate policy.
  • If a prime number is made up entirely of 1s (e.g., 11), then the number of its digits is prime.
  • The word CARBON is itself made up of element symbols (Ca, Rb, O, N). (Dmitri Borgmann)
  • Interior decorator Nicholas Haslam: “All it comes down to is making a setting in which people look prettier.”

07/17/2024 UPDATE: Several readers point out, correctly, that carbon is hardly the only elemental “chemical word” — indeed, some elements can be spelled in multiple ways. I’ve assembled this list from multiple contributions:

ArSeNiC ArSeNIC
AsTaTiNe
BiSmUTh BISmUTh
CArBON CaRbON
CoPPEr COPPEr
IrON
KrYPtON
NeON
OGaNeSSON OGaNEsSON
PHoSPHoRuS PHOSPHoRuS PHOsPHoRuS PHoSPHORus PHOSPHORuS PHOsPHORuS
SiLiCoN SiLiCON SILiCON SILiCoN
SiLvEr SILvEr
TeNNeSSINe TeNNEsSiNe TeNNEsSINe
TiN
XeNON XeNoN

TiN is even a valid compound, titanium nitride.

Of these Borgmann had found arsenic, carbon, iron, neon, phosphorus, silicon, and xenon when he wrote in 1974, “surely the most unusual is CARBON which can be factored into elements not including itself.” But that property wasn’t unique even within his limited list, as can be seen above.

Many thanks to readers Gareth McCaughan, Catalin Voinescu, and Eric Harshbarger for writing in about this.

| Language · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Unusual Biological Names

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Image: Wikimedia Commons
  • Herpetologist Mark Scherz named three tiny species of Malagasy frog Mini ature, Mini scule, and Mini mum.
  • Malacologist Alan Solem named a Fijian land snail Ba humbugi.
  • The name of each species in the African spider genus Palindroma is a palindrome: P. aleykyela, P. avonova, P. morogorom, P. obmoimiombo, P. sinis.
  • The binomial name of the crowned slaty flycatcher has 15 syllables: Griseotyrannus aurantioatrocristatus.
  • Malacologist John Stanisic named an Australian land snail Crikey steveirwini.
  • The Australian leafhopper genus Dziwneono, named by entomologist Irena Dworakowska, is Polish for “It is strange.”

In 1977, on receiving a package of insect specimens from a colleague, entomologist Arnold Menke exclaimed, “Aha, a new genus!” His colleague Eric Grissell responded “Ha” doubtfully. Menke was proven right and named the species, an Australian wasp, Aha ha. He ordered a custom registration plate for his car bearing the same phrase. Further odd names.

| Language · Science & Math

Close Reading

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Teaching at Cornell in the 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov offered a European fiction course whose exam questions could be distressingly broad or pitilessly specific — some examples are given in an appendix to Lectures on Literature:

Bleak House

  • Why did Dickens need to give Esther three suitors (Guppy, Jarndyce, and Woodcourt)?
  • If you compare Lady Dedlock and Skimpole, which of them is the author’s greater success?
  • Discuss the structure and style of Bleak House.
  • Discuss John Jarndyce’s house. (Mangles? Surprised birds?)
  • Discuss the visit to Bell Yard (Neckett’s children; and Mr. Gridley).
  • Give at least four examples of the “child theme” in Bleak House.
  • What kind of place was Bleak House — give at least four descriptive details.
  • Where was Bleak House situated?
  • How is the “bird theme” linked up with Krook?
  • How is the “fog theme” linked up with Krook?
  • Whose style are we reminded of when Dickens raises his voice?
  • The social side (“upper class” versus “lower class” etc.) is the weakest one in Bleak House. Who was Mr. George’s brother? What part did he play? Should a major reader skip those pages, even if they are weak?
  • Follow Mr. Guppy through Bleak House.

Madame Bovary

  • Describe briefly Flaubert’s use of the counterpoint technique in the County Fair scene.
  • There are numerous thematic lines in Madame Bovary, such as “Horse,” “Plaster Priest,” “Voice,” “The Three Doctors.” Describe these four themes briefly.
  • Discuss Flaubert’s use of the word “and.”
  • What character in Madame Bovary behaves in very much the same way as a character in Bleak House does under somewhat similar circumstances? The thematic clue is: “devotion.”
  • Is there a Dickensian atmosphere about Flaubert’s description of Berthe’s infancy and childhood? (Be specific.)
  • The features of Fanny Price and Esther are pleasantly blurred. Not so with Emma. Describe her eyes, hair, hands, skin.
  • Would you say that Emma’s nature was hard and shallow?
  • Would she prefer a landscape peopled with ruins and cows to one that contained no allusions to people?
  • Did she like her mountain lakes with or without a lone skiff?
  • What had Emma read? Name at least four works and their authors.

In his annotated copy of The Metamorphosis, Nabokov, a trained entomologist, observed that “A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes” — and thus Gregor Samsa is “a beetle with human eyes.”

| Literature

First Impressions

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The beginnings of Algebra I found far more difficult [than Euclid], perhaps as a result of bad teaching. I was made to learn by heart: ‘The square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product.’ I had not the vaguest idea what this meant, and when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way.

— The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1967

| Society

Full Service

In his 1967 book Beyond Language, Dmitri Borgmann points out that every permutation of the three words ONE, MAY, and SAW produces a valid English sentence:

  1. ONE MAY SAW. (An individual has the privilege of performing the action of sawing some object, such as a wooden log.)
  2. ONE SAW MAY. (One person saw the girl whose first name is ‘May’.)
  3. MAY ONE SAW? (Is one permitted to saw wood?)
  4. MAY SAW ONE. (A girl named ‘May’ saw some object, previously mentioned, that is regarded as belonging to a group of objects of like character.)
  5. SAW ONE, MAY! (Cut a log of wood in half, May, by sawing through it!)
  6. SAW MAY ONE! (Saw a log of wood for May, Buster!)

In Word Ways, David Morice notes that BILL, PAT, and SUE can produce 12 valid three-word sentences, distinguished by capitalization and comma placement. Each item in the first group corresponds in meaning to one in the second:

Bill, pat Sue.     Pat Sue, Bill.
Bill, sue Pat.     Sue Pat, Bill.
Sue, bill Pat.     Bill Pat, Sue.
Sue, pat Bill.     Pat Bill, Sue.
Pat, bill Sue.     Bill Sue, Pat.
Pat, sue Bill.     Sue Bill, Pat.

(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 26:2 [May 1993], 105-117.)

| Language

Melodic Puns

In Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, in which the phrase “me and my soul” is sung repeatedly, the words me and soul are sung to the notes mi and sol.

In the song “Sodomy” in the 1967 rock musical Hair, the word sodomy is sung to the notes so, do, and mi.

(From Dave Morice, The Dictionary of Wordplay, 2001.)

06/13/2024 UPDATE: In 1955, entomologists James Brennan and D. Elden Beck named two new species of chigger Trombicula doremi and Trombicula fasola.

| Art

Concise

Two hundred kilometers west of Pretoria is a farm called Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein. The name, the longest place name in South Africa, means “the spring where two buffaloes were shot stone dead with one shot.”

As a daughter language of Dutch, Afrikaans is capable of almost endless compounding, at least in principle. In his 1982 Total Book of South African Records, Eric Rosenthal claims that the longest word in the language is Tweedehandse­motor­verkoops­manne­vakbond­stakings­vergadering­sameroepers­toespraak­skrywers­pers­verklaring­uitreikings­media­konferensie­aankondiging, “issuable media conference’s announcement at a press release regarding the convener’s speech at a secondhand car dealership union’s strike meeting.” But, as with many such records, the word was contrived expressly and is not in common use.

| Language