“Come Into the Arms of the Shoving Leopard”

The Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) was famously reputed to swap consonants in his speech (“The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer”).

His legend has grown so popular that today it’s hard to known which “spoonerisms” really happened. For instance, Spooner might really have asked, “Is the bean dizzy?”, but he almost certainly never said, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures and were caught fighting a liar in the quad. Having tasted two worms, you will leave by the next town drain.”

But we can be fairly certain that when he proposed a toast to “The Boar’s Head” (a pub), it was not a spoonerism.

He was a priest, after all.

| Language

Seeing Stars

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Matejko-Astronomer_Copernicus-Conversation_with_God.jpg

Copernicus, that learned wight,
The glory of his nation,
With draughts of wine refreshed his sight,
And saw the Earth’s rotation;
Each planet then its orb described,
The Moon got under way, sir;
These truths from nature he imbibed
For he drank his bottle a day, sir!

— From “The Astronomer’s Drinking Song,” in Augustus De Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes, 1866

| Poems · Science & Math

Just Teller

Teller, of the magician duo Penn and Teller, has no first or middle name. His parents named him Raymond Joseph Teller, but he had the given names legally removed. On government documents his first name is listed as NFN, meaning “no first name.”

| Language

“It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Humpty_Dumpty_Tenniel.jpg

Do you recognize this passage?

Homme petit d’homme petit, s’attend, n’avale
Homme petit d’homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s’y mènent
Coup d’un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine

No? Try reading it aloud.

Cognitive scientists use it to illustrate the complexity of human communications.

| Language · Poems

More Anagrams

More anagrams:

  • ANGERED = ENRAGED
  • CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE = ACTUAL CRIME ISN’T EVINCED
  • DISAPPOINTMENT = MADE IN PINT POTS
  • ENDEARMENTS = TENDER NAMES
  • MARRIAGE = A GRIM ERA
  • MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS = NOTED MISCALCULATIONS
  • PUNISHMENT = NINE THUMPS
  • ROME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY = ANY LABOUR I DO WANTS TIME
  • SAINT ELMO’S FIRE = IS LIT FOR SEAMEN
  • SAUCINESS = CAUSES SIN
  • SOFT-HEARTEDNESS = OFTEN SHEDS TEARS
  • A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE = THIS IS MEANT AS INCENTIVE
  • WESTERN UNION = NO WIRE UNSENT

Louis XIII appointed a Provencal to be his royal anagrammatist. He was paid 1,200 livres a year.

| Language

Skeptics’ Prizes

The International Zetetic Challenge offered a prize of 200,000 euros to “any person who could prove any paranormal phenomenon.” It ran for 15 years, starting in 1987.

Magician James Randi has offered $1 million to anyone who can show evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event, under test conditions agreed to by both parties.

Both prizes have gone unrewarded.

| Science & Math

The Monkey Signalman

For a time in the 1880s, a baboon named Jack was employed as a railroad signalman in South Africa. He was working, apparently successfully, as a voorloper, or ox driver, in the Eastern Cape when he was discovered by James Erwin Wide, a Uitenhage signalman who had recently lost his legs in an accident.

Impressed and needing a helper, Wide bought the baboon and trained him to operate his junction. When a train approached it would identify itself with a whistle; Jack would get the keys, head into the signal box and pull the correct lever to change tracks. Alarmed riders complained, but railway management investigated and were so impressed that they actually put the baboon on a railway allowance and rations, including a small amount of brandy per day.

I know this sounds preposterous, but there are photographs of Jack at work and eyewitness accounts of his abilities. His skull can be seen today in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown.

| Oddities