A self-inventorying crossword from Lee Sallows:
This one even tallies the number of spaces it contains!
(Thanks, Lee!)
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.”
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.
Math Notes
In 1798, Adrien-Marie Legendre claimed that 6 is not the sum of two rational cubes.
In 1865, Gabriel Lamé observed that 6 = (37/21)3 + (17/21)3.
Unquote
“I hate Twitter. It’s like a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers.” — Stewart Lee
Double Duty
The last movement of Paul Hindemith’s 1942 piano work Ludus Tonalis is identical to the first movement, only backward and upside down.
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
Borrowed Time
A striking detail from Martha Tyson’s Sketch of the Life of Benjamin Banneker (1854):
Whilst they were conversing his clock struck the hour, and at their request he gave an interesting account of its construction. With his imperfect tools, and with no other model than a borrowed watch, it had cost him long and patient labor to perfect it, to make the variation necessary to cause it to strike the hours, and produce a concert of correct action between the hour, the minute, and the second machinery. He confessed that its regularity in pointing out the progress of time had amply rewarded all his pains in its construction.
This seems to be at least plausibly true: In 1753, the 21-year-old Banneker, who had never seen a clock, borrowed a watch from a trader, made drawings of its workings, and designed a wooden clock of his own. Peter N. Stearns writes in Time in World History (2020), “Banneker, the son of former slaves, borrowed a watch from an acquaintance, took it apart, ultimately using this as a model to build an impressively accurate clock entirely from carved wooden pieces, and then capitalized on the notoriety of this product to set up his own repair operation.” The clock continued to operate until Banneker’s death more than half a century later.
In a Word
contubernal
adj. living in the same tent
Twilight
We do not know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last of the mastodons, but we can take it that they were nothing very remarkable. It is hardly likely that the last man will have the mind of a Goethe. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human progress.
— Anatole France, Under the Rose, 1925