Last Words

In The King’s English (1997), Kingsley Amis cites an old joke that illustrates the confusing distinction between shall and will:

A swimmer in difficulties was heard to shout, ‘I will drown and nobody shall save me.’ At an inquest on the unfortunate fellow, English jurors wanted a verdict of suicide, Scottish jurors a verdict of death by misadventure, and MacTavish pressed for a rider or footnote rebuking witnesses for making no effort to rescue the victim.

Under the old rule, I shall indicated a prediction and I will denoted a promise or threat. Confusingly, in the second and third persons these meanings were reversed, so that you/she will indicated simple futurity and you/she shall denoted an intention or command. Still more confusingly, old-fashioned speakers of Scottish English reversed this whole understanding of the matter. So while the English jurors thought the swimmer was saying, “It is my intention to drown, and it is my express desire that nobody try to save me,” the Scots took him to say, “I am going to drown and it seems that nobody is going to save me.”

All this has only grown more confused with the popularity of contractions such as I’ll and you’ll, and Americans have generally dispensed with shall and use will for everything. Of the joke, Amis writes, “Nobody tells that one today.”

| Language

All in the Family

A Mr. Harwood had two daughters by his first wife, the eldest of whom was married to John Coshick; this Coshick had a daughter by his first wife, whom old Harwood married, and by her he had a son; therefore, John Coshick’s second wife could say as follows:–

My father is my son, and I’m my mother’s mother;
My sister is my daughter, and I’m grandmother to my brother.

— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1869

| Oddities

A Chess Maze

hall chess puzzle

By Daniel Currie Hall. Suppose time stops and the white knight can make as many consecutive moves as it pleases. How quickly can it mate the black king provided that it never moves onto a square on which it’s under attack? (It can make captures, provided it makes them “safely.”)

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Plunges in Dumbness

In his adopted home of Majorca, Robert Graves once encountered a memorable tourist leaflet:

They are hollowed out in the see coast at the municipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called ‘The Spider’ There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their eulogy about, included Nort-American geoglogues

He commemorated it with a poem:

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops
While all admit their impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the strength of water drops

The whole thing is here.

| Language · Poems

Another Christmas Quiz

King William’s College, on the Isle of Man, has posted this year’s edition of “The World’s Most Difficult Quiz,” with its customary epigraph, Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est (“The greatest part of knowledge is knowing where to find something”). Some sample questions:

  • During 1925, in what was the worrying amnesia of Charles Edward Biffen revealed?
  • Where did Ross’s trainer trial tendon-nicking on three sheep?
  • Beating, tacking, reaching, luffing or even protesting — what took its name from the long-finned tuna?
  • Which Roman edifice was believed to stand above the head of a mythical three-bodied ogre?
  • Who was Mr Winterbottom?
  • In which Cathedral is illumination seemingly provided by tungsten?
  • What name mimicked that of an elite Pullman service, but with a change of weapon?
  • Who warned of an explosion in three seconds on his banana night?
  • Where was the final resting place of the Bronze Age toxophilite?

Answers will be posted at the end of January.

Usually MetaFilter organizes a Google spreadsheet of communal guesses; if that materializes I’ll post a link here.

| Puzzles

Seeing Double

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milton_Othello_Reeves_1911.png

Introduced in 1911 by engineer Milton Reeves, the Octo-Auto promised to crawl along bumpy roads like a caterpillar. Each end of the 20-foot chassis rested on a four-wheeled truck, so that when one pair of wheels rose over an obstruction, its companion pair remained on the level. As a result, the driver would feel only half the normal disturbance.

Unfortunately, the extravagant design cost a third more to produce than a typical four-wheeler. Reeves learned his lesson and moved on to the Sexto-Auto — a car with only six wheels.

| Oddities · Technology

Self-Seeking

kalogeropoulos fraction

From reader Giorgos Kalogeropoulos:

“This continued fraction converges to a constant and this constant is the terms of the continued fraction concatenated.”

Constant: 1.329571098921067061816694798131449807696979288539287861665690554139889293716015345375844973593801890…

Terms: 1, 3, 29, 5, 710, 9, 8, 92, 10, 6, 70, 61, 81, 66, 94, 7, 98, 13, 14, 4, 980, 76, 96, 97, 928, 85, 39, 2, 87, 86, 16, 65, 690, 55, 41, 398, 89, 293, 71, 60, 15, 34, 53, 75, 84, 49, 73, 59, 380, 18, 90…

“This is the lexicographically earliest sequence starting with {1,3…}.”

(Thanks, Giorgos.)

| Science & Math

Ah

A reader nicknamed MANX submitted this poser to The Enigma, the magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League, in September 1985.

The letters in BENEATH CHOPIN can be rearranged into a fitting three-word phrase of 3, 5, and 5 letters. What is it?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Food for Thought

A selection of topics considered by the Athenian Society, a learned organization established in 1691 to answer “all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex”:

Bashfulness, why in Women more than Men?
Books least known to those that need ’em
Bath-waters, what makes ’em hot?
Dials, Clocks and Watches, when first made?
Eunuch, whether ever in Love?
Greenland, how should a Tree come there?
Hedg-hogs, how are they propagated?
Head or Feet, which Travels most?
Knowledge of Men or Things, which best?
Kissing, is there any Pleasure in it?
Love, its discovery
Lady, whether she may marry herself?
Love after Marriage, whether as great as before?
Matter, whether infinitely divisible or no?
Memory, how shall I strengthen it?
Nettle, how does it sting?
Original copy of the Bible, how proved?
Offence committed, which was the first?
Pre-existence of the Soul, how is it?
Rain-bow, its Cause
Socrates, did he wisely in bearing the Clamours of his Wife?
Vow never to Marry, whether I may break it?
Vows made to a Lady, whether binding?
Virginity or Marriage, which best?
Women, why more talkative than Men?

Readers submitted their questions anonymously, and the responses were published weekly.

| Literature

In a Word

ampullosity
n. pretentious use of language

Though much hath been written and said in order to render the Lexiphantic style ridiculous, yet it is surprising to see how it keeps its ground among circles of a certain kind, where even good sense is by no means a stranger: — let the following card witness, which was really sent by a gentleman to a lady, who had asked his company to tea and supper: — ‘Mr. F—-‘s compliments to Miss S—-, at your post meridian computation, be not fascinated with the ardescence of my bibulating in co, since anterior motives stimulate me to itinerate in a transverse direction. But after the diurnal operosity hath increased the delectability of Vesper, perhaps I may saturate a wonted appetite, by the contuding that petacious root, so nice an esculent, if humidated by butter, joined to mellifluous conviviality.’ — It was read twice before the lady found out that the writer excused himself from coming to tea, but would probably eat a roasted potatoe with her at night.

— Geoffry Gambado, New Oddest of All Oddities, for 1813

| Language