Like its predecessor, our present civilization may be no more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have grown only that, accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again for better things to follow.
— H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920
Bycocket is an obsolete word for a kind of cap or headdress. Its entry in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains this woeful note:
Through a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error, this word appears in modern dictionaries as ABACOT. In Hall’s Chron. a bicocket appears to have been misprinted abococket, which was copied by Grafton, altered by Holinshed to abococke, and finally ‘improved’ by Abraham Fleming to abacot (perhaps through an intermediate abacoc); hence it was again copied by Baker, inserted in his Glossarium by Spelman, and thence copied by Phillips, and so handed down through Bailey, Ash, Todd, etc., to 19th century dictionaries (some of which provide a picture of the ‘abacot’), and even inserted in dictionaries of English and foreign languages.
The OED defines abacot as a “variant of bycocket”.
An arresting sentence from poet George Barker’s 1950 novel The Dead Seagull:
“They cut down elms to build asylums for people driven mad by the cutting down of elms.”
How many distinct knots have exactly 10 crossings? By the late 20th century, mathematicians believed the number to be 166.
Then, in 1973, New York attorney and part-time mathematician Kenneth A. Perko Jr. discovered that two of these were essentially the same knot.
The correspondence had gone unnoticed for 75 years.
In 1768, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new alphabet, warning that without a phonetic scheme to stabilize spelling and pronunciation, “our writing will become the same with the Chinese as to the difficulty of learning and using it.” He composed this letter as a sample of his idea:
He explains everything (and answers the imagined objections above) in this essay.
Spotted on the r/linguisticshumor subreddit:
A problem from the Third Penguin Problems Book, 1946:
“Flutterby’s grandfather died in 1872. Flutterby died one hundred and thirty-one years after his grandfather was born. Their ages add up to one hundred and five years. When was Flutterby born?”
In 2004, the world’s foremost scholar on Sherlock Holmes was found garrotted on his bed. Richard Lancelyn Green had been planning a three-volume biography of Arthur Conan Doyle but had had trouble gaining rights to the author’s private papers and manuscripts, which were scheduled to be auctioned at Christie’s. Lancelyn Green believed that Doyle’s daughter had wanted these to go to the British Library instead, but his efforts to stop the auction had been unsuccessful. In the weeks before his death he told friends that an unidentified American was following him and that he’d come to fear that his contention over the papers might have put his life in danger.
The coroner returned an open verdict. Lancelyn Green’s best friends said it was not in his nature to take his own life, but others wondered whether he might have arranged his death to cast suspicion on a rival, mirroring the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which a jealous wife contrives her suicide to cast doubt on a woman her husband had been flirting with.
The case remains unsolved. “I think he wanted it to look like murder,” said James Gibson, who had edited a Doyle bibliography with Lancelyn Green in 1983. “He must have been planning it for days, giving us false clues. He created the perfect mystery.”
Al-longs, ong-fong der lar Part-ree-e-yer,
Ler joor der glwore ait arr-ee-vay.
— Lyrics to La Marseillaise rendered in phonetic French for British soldiers in World War I, from Frank Scudamore’s “Parley Voo”!!, 1915 (via Tony Augarde’s Wordplay, 2011)
In an 1893 textbook, criminologist Hans Gross tells how investigators interpreted this ideograph, which had appeared on the wall of a remote Austrian chapel:
The bird, drawn with a single stroke, represents a parrot, alluding to the great loquacity of the owner of the mark, who was famous housebreaker. The second sign is a church, the third a key. Below, we see three round objects on a line; this, according to the calendar of the Styrian peasantry, is the emblem of St. Stephen, i.e., three stones placed on the ground, alluding to the martyrdom of the Saint by stoning. They here indicate the date, viz., St. Stephen’s Day, 26th December. By the side is an infant in swaddling clothes, this indicates the birth of the Saviour, the date being 25th December. The whole thus means: the owner of the parrot sign intends to break into a church on 26th December. He desires accomplices, and will accordingly be in the neighbourhood of the sign (a lonely chapel in a wood) on 25th December to meet whoever turns up.
“The police, knowing the importance of the signs, took a copy to the Magistrate, a priest helped to interpret the liturgical emblems, and on Christmas day four dangerous criminals were captured near the chapel in the wood.”