I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro? No, he’s just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.
Author: Greg Ross
Having Words
It’s said that Samuel Johnson resorted to unconventional methods to win a debate with a Billingsgate fishwife:
He called her a noun, a pronoun, an adverb, and she hesitated. He vigorously charged her with being conjunction and preposition. She wavered. And when at length with stentorian voice he accused her to her face of being a parallelopipedon, she broke in disorder and fled in the utmost confusion.
(Frederic Coudert, “Lying as a Fine Art,” 1873.)
Dry
It has been claimed that only three people read the three volumes of Russell and Whitehead’s monumental Principia Mathematica in its entirety, namely Russell, Whitehead, and the proofreader. There has been some scepticism, however, about Russell and Whitehead belonging to the list.
— Leo Moser, quoted in Howard Eves, Mathematical Circles Adieu, 1977
Bhartrhari’s Paradox
There are some things that are unnameable. But it seems impossible to verify this by giving positive instances, because this would require us to name that which we have declared to be unnameable.
From an observation by the fifth-century Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhartrhari. “[E]very argument advanced to support any instance of the unnameability thesis drives one still more firmly into the paradox,” note philosophers Hans and Radhika Herzberger, “for they naturally tend to involve repeated reference to the very things whose unnameability they undertake to establish.”
(Hans G. Herzberger and Radhika Herzberger, “Bhartrhari’s Paradox,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 9:1 [March 1981], 1-17.)
Taking Pause
‘Theft’ is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of ‘rightfully owned property’ — and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as ‘theft.’ Thus, the statement ‘All property is theft’ has an internal contradiction: to use the concept ‘theft’ while denying the validity of the concept of ‘property,’ is to use ‘theft’ as a concept to which one has no logical right — that is, as a stolen concept.
— Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963
Around the World
A brainteaser from the British intelligence agency GCHQ:
Explain the following: falkun, home de guerra, kick, lavoro, moed, mosca, raccordement, schafer, stobhach, tre, zevk.
Good Enough
The opening of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” has been held up as a model of bad writing for nearly two centuries. But it’s also the opening sentence of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning 1962 young adult science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time.
Apparently this was deliberate. L’Engle biographer Leonard Marcus writes, “With a wink to the reader, she chose for the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time, her most audaciously original work of fiction, that hoariest of clichés … L’Engle herself was certainly aware of the old warhorse’s literary provenance as … Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s much-maligned, much-parodied repository of Victorian purple prose, Paul Clifford.”
“Scripture Cake”
Contributed by Mrs. M.L. Dow to a cookbook compiled by the Ladies of Trinity Church, Claremont, N.H., 1899:
4 1/2 cups 1st Kings 4:22
1 1/2 cups Judges 5:25
2 cups Jeremiah 6:20
2 cups 1st Samuel 30:12
2 cups Nahum 3:12
1 cup Numbers 17:8
1/2 cup Judges 4:19
2 tablespoons of 1st Samuel 14:25
1 pinch of Leviticus 2:13
2 teaspoons of Amos 4:5
6 teaspoons Jeremiah 17:11
The first line calls for 4 1/2 cups of flour, because 1 Kings 4:22 reads “And Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty measures of fine flour, and threescore measures of meal.” In the same way, the rest refer respectively to butter, sugar, raisins, figs, almonds, milk, honey, salt, leaven, and eggs. No baking instructions are given.
CyberChance
A puzzle by National Security Agency applied research mathematician Nicholas R., from the agency’s October 2016 Puzzle Periodical:
Eddie, Layne, Kurt, and Chris are locked in a heated game of CyberChance which only one of them will win. Their fans are on the edge of their seats: everyone knows that in CyberChance, things can change at any moment. One fan, who prefers Kurt or Chris, is feeling worried since there is only a 4-in-10 chance that one of them will win. An Eddie fan brags that Eddie is twice as likely as Layne to come out on top. Another Eddie fan concurs, and adds the following observation: Chris is Eddie’s main competition. He figures that, given that Chris doesn’t win, Eddie has a 4-in-7 chance of winning. A Kurt fan has been quietly standing in the corner, listening to all the other fans, and wonders: What chance does Kurt have of winning CyberChance?
Point of Order
“Mr. Chairman, before we put the motion ‘That the motion be now put,’ should we not first put the motion ‘That the motion “That the motion be now put” be now put’?” — Punch, 1952