Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.
‘I should think not,’ he said; ‘he took himself along with him.’
— Montaigne, Essays
Author: Greg Ross
Nontransitive Tennis
A problem from the 17th Irish Mathematical Olympiad, in 2004:
In a tennis tournament, each player played one match against each of the others. If each player won at least one match, show that there’s a group of three players A, B, C in which A beat B, B beat C, and C beat A.
Tense Trouble
Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York.
Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney.
Would you say ‘There will be an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’
Or would you say ‘There was an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’
That’s from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s It’s About Time, from 1935. For the record, the Associated Press would dateline the story SYDNEY and refer to clock times in that location.
Discernment
The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you’ve written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called ‘They Walk Alone.’ ‘Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if,’ it seemed to say.
— Wolcott Gibbs, “The Theatre,” New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941
To the Point
In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”:
Madam,
We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on Tuesday next, the 14th inst., before 12 noon, which we trust will be convenient, after which our quotation will at once issue.
He reduces this to:
Madam,
We have your letter of May 9th requesting an estimate for the removal of your furniture and effects to Burbleton, and a man will call to see them next Tuesday forenoon if convenient, after which we will send the estimate without delay.
This shortens the letter from 66 words to 42. Then he cuts it again, to 35 words, or 157 letters against the original 294, a savings of nearly 50 percent:
Madam,
Thank you for your letter of May 9th. A man will call next Tuesday, forenoon, to see your furniture and effects, after which, without delay, we will send our estimate for their removal to Burbleton.
In a large firm, he estimates, cutting “verbose and indolent, obscure, inelegant, and time-devouring monkey-talk” could save a week’s work for two typists.
Elsewhere he considers a memo that reads “Hot-Water Bottles: With reference to the above matter I should like an opportunity of discussing same with you.” The improvement he suggests is “Could we, please, have a talk about Hot-Water Bottles?”
Pithy
Mark Antony’s funeral oration rendered in Scrabble tiles, by Pete Stickland:
COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH!
The tiles can also spell:
QUEASY RADIOMAN WEPT: GOT TO EYE FEROCIOUS BLAZE OF VIVID AERIAL EXPLOSION, CREMATING WILTED HINDENBURG AT LAKEHURST, N.J.
Roll Call
Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s:
- A. Noble Ladd
- Beverage Porter
- Bunker Hill
- Charming Fox
- Erie Lake
- France Paris
- Gunga Dean
- Harness Upp
- Harry Baer
- Ima Goose
- Jack Frost
- Johnny Steele Casebeer
- Liberty Bond
- Pansy Leafe
- Pearl Button
- Rose Bush
- Safety Reuel First
- Winter Frost
Ima Foster and Ura Foster, possibly twin sisters, both received master’s degrees in education at the University of Oklahoma in 1943. “It has been suggested to me that most of the bearers of jocular names come of families in which infant baptism is not practiced, inasmuch as (it is to be hoped) few clergymen would consent to make a travesty of the sacrament of baptism by bestowing such names in christening.”
(Thomas Pyles, “Onomastic Individualism in Oklahoma,” American Speech 22:4 [December 1947], 257-264.)
08/15/2024 UPDATE: It appears Safety First became a cardiologist. “My dad gave me this troublesome title. We already had a junior in the family, so dad named me after the popular motto that had just been created.” (Thanks, Charlotte.)
Shorthand
The so-called four-field approach in anthropology divides the discipline into four subfields: archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology.
Students call these “stones, tones, bones, and thrones.”
Sharp Practice
Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor’s, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.’ I thought this not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in shaving; — holding the razor more or less perpendicular; — drawing long or short strokes; — beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; — at the right side or the left side. Indeed, when one considers what variety of sounds can be uttered by the windpipe, in the compass of a very small aperture, we may be convinced how many degrees of difference there may be in the application of a razor.
— James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
Stature
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Venice’s Museo Correr exhibits a pair of wooden implements whose use isn’t immediately clear — they’re chopines, a type of platform shoe popular in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Worn under a woman’s skirt they could add up to 20 inches to her height, giving her an impressive eminence but an uncertain gait. Shakespeare mocked the trend in Hamlet’s greeting to a visiting player:
“By’r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine.”
08/15/2024 UPDATE: Reader Peter Kidd notes this even more impressive pair, now at the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna:
(Thanks, Peter.)