In a certain street are three tailors. The first to set up shop hung out this sign — ‘Here is the best tailor in the town.’ The next put up — ‘Here is the best tailor in the world.’ The third simply had this — ‘Here is the best tailor in this street.’
— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899
“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.” — André Gide, Journals
(Thanks, Macari.)
A puzzle by F. Nazarov from the May-June 1996 issue of Quantum:
On a certain familiar island, some residents always lie, and the others always tell the truth. The total population is 100. Each resident worships one of three gods, the sun god, the moon god, or the Earth god. One day a visitor asks each resident three questions:
Sixty residents answer yes to the first question, 40 to the second, and 30 to the third. How many residents are liars?
For a story on library cutbacks in a certain Essex town, the Telegraph chose the headline BOOK LACK IN ONGAR.
(Apparently apocryphal, but entertaining.)
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.
06/03/2026 UPDATE: Reader Jason Taff notes:
The word ‘I’ is pronounced as a diphthong in English, and it’s transcribed as such in that text. But the first vowel of the diphthong in the text matches the ‘schwa’ vowel in the last syllable of ‘Kensington’, whereas modern English pronounces that first sound to match the sound in the word ‘not’ (which appears later in the text).
This is precisely a remnant of what’s called the Great English Vowel Shift that separates Chaucerian English from Shakespearean English. It had started in Shakespeare’s time (1600’s), but hadn’t fully progressed to its modern version in Franklin’s time (1700’s). This text is a snapshot record of that change in progress!
(Thanks, Jason.)