Sharp Wit

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In his 1869 French rendering of Alice in Wonderland, Henri Bué found a uniquely felicitous way to translate a pun. Here’s the original:

‘If everybody minded their own business,’ the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, ‘the world would go round a deal faster than it does.’

‘Which would not be an advantage,’ said Alice … ‘Just think what work it would make with the day and night! You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis –‘

‘Talking of axes,’ said the Duchess, ‘chop off her head.’

Bué couldn’t reproduce the pun using the French word for ax (hache), but he came up with this:

‘Si chacun s’occupait de ses affaires,’ dit la Duchesse avec un grognement rauque, ‘le mond n’en irait que mieux.’

‘Ce qui ne serait guère avantageux,’ dit Alice … ‘Songez à ce que deviendraient le jour et la nuit; vous voyez bien, la terre met vingt-quatre heures à faire sa révolution.’

‘Ah! vous parlez de faire des révolutions!’ dit la Duchesse. ‘Qu’on lui coupe la tête!’

In The Astonishment of Words, Victor Proetz writes, “Here Bué — with a stroke of wizardry and judgment which, in this instance, is not translation by word, but translation by change of word — has instantaneously transformed a witty English idea in its entirety into a perfectly parallel, equally witty French idea. And when ‘the Duchess’ changes into ‘la Duchesse,’ the axe, by association, becomes a guillotine.”

| Language · Literature

Impromptu

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Lunching at Stephen Spenders’ in 1946, T.S. Eliot admired his host’s transparent cigarette case. Spender sent it to him with this verse:

When those aged eagle eyes which look
Through human flesh as through a book,
Swivel an instant from the page
To ignite the luminous image
With the match that lights his smoke —
Then let the case be transparent
And let the cigarettes, apparent
To his x-ray vision, lie
As clear as rhyme and image to his eye.

Eliot responded:

The sudden unexpected gift
Is more precious in the eyes
Than the ordinary prize
Of slow approach or movement swift.
While the cigarette is whiffed
And the tapping finger plies
Here upon the table lies
The fair transparency. I lift
The eyelids of the aging owl
At twenty minutes to eleven
Wednesday evening (summer time)
To salute the younger fowl
With this feeble halting rhyme
The kind, the admirable Stephen.

| Poems

Subvick Quarban

In studying the relationship between brain function and language, University of Alberta psychologist Chris Westbury found that people agree nearly unanimously as to the funniness of nonsense words. Some of the words predicted to be most humorous in his study:

howaymb, quingel, finglam, himumma, probble, proffin, prounds, prothly, dockles, compide, mervirs, throvic, betwerv

It seems that the less statistically likely a collection of letters is to form a real word in English, the funnier it strikes us. Why should that be? Possibly laughter signals to ourselves and others that we’ve recognized that something is amiss but that it’s not a danger to our safety.

(Chris Westbury et al., “Telling the World’s Least Funny Jokes: On the Quantification of Humor as Entropy,” Journal of Memory and Language 86 [2016], 141–156.)

| Language · Science & Math

Inventory

sallows self-descriptive rectangle tiling

Lee Sallows sent this self-descriptive rectangle tiling: The grid catalogs its own contents by arranging its 70 letters and 14 spaces into 14 itemizing phrases.

Bonus: The rectangle measures 7 × 12, which is commemorated by the two strips that meet in the top left-hand corner. And “The author’s signature is also incorporated.”

(Thanks, Lee!)

| Language · Science & Math

“The Sentimental Law Student”

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Writing in the Territorial Enterprise in 1863, Mark Twain claimed to have found the following letter atop Sugarloaf Peak, Nevada. It was addressed to Miss Mary Links of Virginia City from Solon Lycurgus, “law student, and notary public in and for the said County of Storey, and Territory of Nevada”:

To the loveliness to whom these presents shall come, greeting:–This is a lovely day, my own Mary; its unencumbered sunshine reminds me of your happy face, and in the imagination the same doth now appear before me. Such sights and scenes as this ever remind me, the party of the second part, of you, my Mary, the peerless party of the first part. The view from the lonely and segregated mountain peak, of this portion of what is called and known as Creation, with all and singular the hereditaments and appurtenances thereunto appertaining and belonging, is inexpressively grand and inspiring; and I gaze, and gaze, while my soul is filled with holy delight, and my heart expands to receive thy spirit-presence, as aforesaid. Above me is the glory of the sun; around him float the messenger clouds, ready alike to bless the earth with gentle rain, or visit it with lightning, and thunder, and destruction; far below the said sun and the messenger clouds aforesaid, lying prone upon the earth in the verge of the distant horizon, like the burnished shield of a giant, mine eyes behold a lake, which is described and set forth in maps as the Sink of Carson; nearer, in the great plain, I see the Desert, spread abroad like the mantle of a Colossus, glowing by turns, with the warm light of the sun, hereinbefore mentioned, or darkly shaded by the messenger clouds aforesaid; flowing at right angles with said Desert, and adjacent thereto, I see the silver and sinuous thread of the river, commonly called Carson, which winds its tortuous course through the softly tinted valley, and disappears amid the gorges of the bleak and snowy mountains — a simile of man! — leaving the pleasant valley of Peace and Virtue to wander among the dark defiles of Sin, beyond the jurisdiction of the kindly beaming sun aforesaid! And about said sun, and the said clouds, and around the said mountains, and over the plain and the river aforesaid, there floats a purple glory — a yellow mist — as airy and beautiful as the bridal veil of a princess, about to be wedded according to the rites and ceremonies pertaining to, and established by, the laws or edicts of the kingdom or principality wherein she doth reside, and whereof she hath been and doth continue to be, a lawful sovereign or subject. Ah! my Mary, it is sublime! it is lovely! I have declared and made known, and by these presents do declare and make known unto you, that the view from Sugar Loaf Peak, as hereinbefore described and set forth, is the loveliest picture with which the hand of the Creator has adorned the earth, according to the best of my knowledge and belief, so help me God.

Given under my hand, and in the spirit-presence of the bright being whose love has restored the light of hope to a soul once groping in the darkness of despair, on the day and year first above written.

(Signed) Solon Lycurgus

| Humor

“The End of the Line”

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In the spring of 1934, as police closed in on her and Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker left a poem with her mother:

You’ve read the story of Jesse James
Of how he lived and died
If you’re still in need of something to read
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow Gang,
I’m sure you all have read
how they rob and steal and those who squeal
are usually found dying or dead.

There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups
They’re not so ruthless as that
Their nature is raw, they hate all law
Stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.

They call them cold-blooded killers
They say they are heartless and mean
But I say this with pride, I once knew Clyde
When he was honest and upright and clean.

But the laws fooled around and taking him down
and locking him up in a cell
‘Til he said to me, “I’ll never be free,
So I’ll meet a few of them in hell.”

The road was so dimly lighted
There were no highway signs to guide
But they made up their minds if all roads were blind
They wouldn’t give up ’til they died.

The road gets dimmer and dimmer
Sometimes you can hardly see
But it’s fight man to man, and do all you can
For they know they can never be free.

From heartbreak some people have suffered
From weariness some people have died
But all in all, our troubles are small
‘Til we get like Bonnie and Clyde.

If a policeman is killed in Dallas
And they have no clue or guide
If they can’t find a fiend, just wipe the slate clean
And hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.

There’s two crimes committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow Mob
They had no hand in the kidnap demand
Nor the Kansas City Depot job.

A newsboy once said to his buddy
“I wish old Clyde would get jumped
In these hard times we’d get a few dimes
If five or six cops would get bumped.”

The police haven’t got the report yet
But Clyde called me up today
He said, “Don’t start any fights, we aren’t
working nights, we’re joining the NRA.”

From Irving to West Dallas viaduct
Is known as the Great Divide
Where the women are kin, and men are men
And they won’t stool on Bonnie and Clyde.

If they try to act like citizens
And rent a nice flat
About the third night they’re invited to fight
By a sub-gun’s rat-tat-tat.

They don’t think they’re tough or desperate
They know the law always wins
They’ve been shot at before, but they do not ignore
That death is the wages of sin.

Some day they’ll go down together
And they’ll bury them side by side
To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief
But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.

That May they were ambushed on a Louisiana backroad, where police fired 130 rounds into their car. She was 23, Clyde 25.

| Poems

Going Places

Early in his dancing career, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson performed on a custom double staircase that added drama to his act, increasing his visibility to the audience while amplifying his steps. In What the Eye Hears, Brian Seibert writes, “What the stairs did for Robinson was reveal how he played with the structure of the music through how he played with the structure of the staircase.”

Robinson went through 20 to 30 pairs of clogs a year with footwork so impeccable that a listener under the stage couldn’t distinguish his right foot from his left. A less efficient dancer might have found the narrow steps daunting, but Robinson danced effortlessly “up on the toes,” keeping his feet neatly underneath him while displaying dazzling control and timing.

“As generations of imitators would learn to their grief, the properties of the staircase that magnified Robinson’s mastery equally magnify the slightest imperfection,” Seibert writes. “Dancers tell a story in which he had his musicians cut out for three and a half minutes while he continued dancing. After the allotted time, the musicians came back in, cued by a metronome that Robinson couldn’t hear. He was exactly on beat.”

| Entertainment

Counsel

Sydney Smith to Miss Lucie Austin, July 22, 1835:

Lucy, Lucy, my dear child, don’t tear your frock: tearing frocks is not of itself a proof of genius; but write as your mother writes, act as your mother acts; be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest; and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import.

And Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know, in the first sum of yours I ever saw, there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucy, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who never understood arithmetic; by the time you return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of you; therefore I now give you my parting advice. Don’t marry anybody who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year; and God bless you, dear child.

Sydney Smith

| Literature

Podcast Episode 194: The Double Life of Clarence King

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American geologist Clarence King led a strange double life in the late 1800s: He invented a second identity as a black railroad porter so he could marry the woman he loved, and then spent 13 years living separate lives in both white and black America. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll consider the extraordinary lengths that King went to in order to be with the woman he loved.

We’ll also contemplate the dangers of water and puzzle over a policeman’s strange behavior.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast · Society