Miniatures

In 1925 New York poet Eli Siegel composed the shortest poem in the English language. He called it “One Question”:

I.
Why?

The former record holder was an anonymous verse titled “On the Condition of the United States After Several Years of Prohibition”:

Wet
Yet.

| Poems

Relative Logic

You say that you have a dog.

Yes, and a villain of a one, said Ctesippus.

And he has puppies?

Yes, and they are very like himself.

And the dog is the father of them?

Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together.

And is he not yours?

To be sure he is.

Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.

Let me ask you one little question more, said Dionysodorus, quickly interposing, in order that Ctesippus might not get in his word: You beat this dog?

Ctesippus said, laughing: Indeed I do; and I only wish that I could beat you instead of him.

Then you beat your father, he said.

— Plato, Euthydemus

| Science & Math

Pyrexia

A Lusitanian physician had a patient who insisted upon it he was perpetually frozen, and would sit before a great fire even in the dog-days. The Portuguese Esculapius procured him a dress of rough sheep skins, saturated with aqua vita, and set him on fire. The patient then declared he was quite warm, rather too much so, and was cured.

— Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822

| Oddities

Zoo Cliques

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wilderbeest.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

More nouns of assemblage:

  • a business of ferrets
  • a cartload of chimpanzees
  • a coalition of cheetahs
  • a congress of baboons
  • a gang of elk
  • a huddle of penguins
  • a kaleidoscope of butterflies
  • a labour of moles
  • a prickle of porcupines
  • a quarrel of sparrows
  • a romp of otters
  • a tiding of magpies
  • a tower of giraffes
  • a ubiquity of sparrows
  • a whiteness of swans
  • a zeal of zebras

My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?

| Language · Trivia

“Print of Human Feet in Rocks”

http://books.google.com/books?id=sKxBz47jKHwC&pg=PA344&dq=apparent+prints+or+impressions&ei=xEJxR__xLZOSiQHAlthx&rview=1#PPA345,M1

“Two apparent prints or impressions of the human foot in a tabular mass of limestone,” discussed in Schoolcraft’s Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, 1825:

The rock containing these interesting impressions is a compact limestone of a grayish blue color. It was originally quarried on the left bank of the Mississippi at St. Louis, and is a part of the extensive range of calcareous rocks upon which that town is built. Foundations of private dwellings, and the military works erected by the French and Spaniards, from this material, sixty years ago, are still as solid and unbroken as when first laid.

“The probability … of their having been imparted by some individual of a race of men who were unacquainted with the art of tanning skins, and at a period much anterior to that to which any tradition of the present race of Indians reaches, derives additional weight from this peculiar shape of the feet.”

| Oddities