An Unsolved Cipher

https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/klaus-schmehs-list-of-encrypted-books/

What does this say? It’s an excerpt from a small bound volume given in 1841 by Harvard law professor Theophilus Parsons Jr. to John Davis of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Davis noted, “It was found in his father’s Library after his decease, its origin and contents unknown. I hoped to find some person of sufficient skill in stenography, to decipher the pages. But it is still, to me & those whom I have consulted, a Sealed Book.”

It seems to be a dated record of some kind. The anonymous writer used Arabic numerals, so we can see that the entries are organized by year, month, and day, with long entries on one side of each page and shorter ones on the other.

But no one has ever determined its meaning. It was conjectured that the volume might be the diary of a clergyman, perhaps Theophilus’ father, the Rev. Moses Parsons of Byfield, but the entries extend to 1799, 16 years after Moses’ death.

For now the diary (if that’s what it is) is kept at the Massachusetts Historical Society. MHS reference librarian Jeremy Dibbell writes about it here.

(Via Klaus Schmeh’s Encrypted Book List.)

| Oddities

Misc

  • The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
  • Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
  • A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
  • Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
  • “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams

“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning

| Entertainment · Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Elegy

Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.

Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.

— Mark Twain’s epitaph for his daughter Susy, adapted from Robert Richardson’s poem “Annette”

| Death · Poems

Less Art

Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy rendered in Anglic, a simplified system of English spelling proposed in 1930 by Swedish philologist Robert Eugen Zachrisson:

To be, or not to be: that is the questshon:
Whedher ’tis noebler in the miend to sufer
The slingz and aroz of outraejus fortuen,
Or to taek armz agaenst a see of trublz,
And by opoezing end them? To die: to sleep;
Noe mor; and by a sleep to sae we end
The hart-aek and the thouzend natueral shoks
That flesh is aer to, ’tis a konsumaeshon
Devoutli to be wisht. To die, to sleep;
To sleep! perchaans to dreem: ie, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of deth what dreemz mae kum,
When we hav shufled off this mortl koil,
Must giv us pauz: there’s the respekt
That maeks kalamiti of soe long lief.

The Gettysburg Address would begin: “Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberti, and dedikaeted to the propozishon that aul men are kreaeted eequel.”

| Language

Interloper

The first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) contains a fictitious entry, presumably to catch content thieves:

hink, hinks, hinking, hinked. If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something.

Phony or not, this is a useful word. If it’s adopted widely enough, perhaps the dictionary entry will bootstrap itself into legitimacy.

| Language

Epithet

[Screenwriter Harry] Kurnitz’ most quoted observation was made when he became involved in a running feud with Lynn Loesser, then the wife of Frank Loesser, the songwriter.

‘Lynn,’ Kurnitz said, ‘is the evil of two Loessers.’

— Richard Gehman, “The Little World of Harry Kurnitz,” Playboy, June 1958

| Language