The Unexpected Guest

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“Sometimes the name chosen for the baby betrays only too clearly that it was not wanted,” reports onomastician Elsdon C. Smith in The Story of Our Names (1950). “The English General Registrar Office for the years 1861, 1870 and 1886 disclose the following un-Christian names: Not-Wanted-James, One-Too-Many and That’s-It-Who’d-Have-Thought-It. A woman once named her baby Alpha Omega with the explanation that it was her first and she fervently hoped that it would be her last.”

When one is asked to praise a homely infant, Lewis Carroll recommends saying, “That is a baby!” Presented with a squirming 6-month-old, William James said helplessly, “It seems a very competent baby.” “Might not Falconbridge have condoned such an evasion in an extreme case as being, at worst, a virtuous sin?” writes Lionel Tollemache. “To be frank would be a mortal offence; and to avert a mother’s wrath, one might be tempted to invoke a principle of limited application, ‘Salus amicitiae suprema lex [Let the good of the people be the supreme law].’ Better this than to set up the more widely applicable and therefore more abusable plea, ‘De minimis non curat moralitas [Morality does not concern itself with trifles].'”

| Society

Time and Motion

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If a second is defined by reference to the rotation of the earth on its axis, i.e. as 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/24 of the time between 2 identical positions of the Greenwich meridian relatively to the fixed stars, then, if the earth rotated 10 times more slowly than it does now, it would be possible to run 10 yds. in a second, instead of only a yard as now, and a second would be 10 times longer than it is now; but if cinema machines still moved as fast as they do now, it would still be quite impossible for any one to see a succession of static pictures instead of a moving one. Don’t we mean by a second the length of time which is now 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/24 of the time between etc.?

— G.E. Moore, Commonplace Book, 1962

| Science & Math

Icy Hot

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Feeling mischievous in 1874, Nevada journalist Dan De Quille invented the story of Jonathan Newhouse, “a man of considerable inventive genius” who waded into Death Valley wearing “solar armor,” essentially a suit made of sponge that was wetted continually from an india-rubber sack. “Thus, by the evaporation of the moisture in the armor, it was calculated might be produced almost any degree of cold.”

De Quille published a deadpan report of the tragic outcome in the Territorial Enterprise of July 2: Newhouse’s corpse was found 20 miles inside the desert, “dead and frozen stiff.” “His beard was covered with frost and — though the noonday sun poured down its fiercest rays — an icicle over a foot in length hung from his nose. There he had perished miserably, because his armor had worked but too well, and because it was laced up behind where he could not reach the fastenings.”

Amazingly, even in the heyday of newspaper hoaxes this was largely taken seriously. Scientific American reported it without comment, and London’s Daily Telegraph wrote only that “we should require some additional confirmation before we unhesitatingly accept it.”

De Quille obliged, reporting that Newhouse’s carpet-sack had been found to contain a collection of chemicals that the inventor had apparently combined into “some frigorific mixture.” Apparently he had been wetting the suit with this, not with water, and had inadvertently drenched himself with it while trying to unlace the suit. Whether this satisfied the Telegraph is unclear — they never responded.

| Hoaxes

Fine Pleading

From a letter from Thomas Sheridan to Jonathan Swift, July 15, 1735:

I cum here formo ni. Itis apparent I canta ve mi mærent, mi tenentis tardi. I cursim e veri de nota pen cani res. I ambit. Mi stomachis a cor morante ver re ad ito digesta me ale in a minute. I eat nolam, noram, no dux. I generali eat a quale carbone dedat super an da qualis as fine abit as arabit. I es ter de I eat atro ut at a bit. De vilis in mi a petite. A crustis mi de lite. (I neu Eumenides ago eat tuenti times more.) As unde I eat offa buccas fatas mi arsis. On nam unde I eat sum pes. A tu es de I eat a pud in migra num edit. A venis de I eat sum pasti. Post de notabit. Afri de abit ab re ad. A satur de sum tripes.

That ain’t Latin. What is it?

I come here for money. It is apparent I can’t have my May rent, my tenant is tardy. I curse him every day, not a penny can I raise. I am bit. My stomach is a cormorant, ever ready to digest a meal every minute. I eat no lamb, no ram, no ducks. I generally eat a quail carbonaded at supper, and a quail is as fine a bit as a rabbit. Yesterday I ate a trout at a bit. Devil is in my appetite. A crust is my delight. (I knew you, many days ago, eat twenty times more.) A Sunday I eat of a buck as fat as my arse is. On a Monday I eat some peas. A Tuesday I eat a pudding; my grannum made it. A Wednesday I eat some pasty. Post day not a bit. A Friday a bit of bread. A Saturday some tripes.

“Not a day passed that he did not make a rebus, an anagram, or a madrigal,” wrote William Fraser Rae of Sheridan in the Dictionary of National Biography. “Idle, poor, and gay, he managed his own affairs badly, and he justly wrote of himself, ‘I am famous for giving the best advice and following the worst.'”

| Language

The Bird of the Oxenhams

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In a letter dated July 3, 1632, historian James Howell tells of seeing a curious monument in a London stonecutter’s shop: “Here lies John Oxenham, a goodly young Man, in whose Chamber, as he was struggling with the pangs of death, a Bird with a white breast was seen fluttering about his bed, and so vanished.” Howell says the same apparition attended the deaths of Oxenham’s sister, son, and mother.

He wrote that “This stone is to be sent to a Town hard by Exeter, where this happened.”

An anonymous pamphlet published nine years later gives essentially the same story. A True Relation of an Apparition in the Likeness of a Bird with a White Breast, That Appeared Hovering Over the Death-Beds of Some of the Children of Mr. James Oxenham, of Sale Monchorum, Gent. reports that a ghostly bird had appeared at the deathbeds of John, his mother, his daughter, and an infant.

On looking into this, Sabine Baring-Gould could find no trace of the monument in the Oxenham family’s parish, and the apparition isn’t mentioned on other Oxenham graves. He concludes that many of Howell’s published letters were not genuine but “were first written when he was in the Fleet prison, to gain money for the relief of his necessities.”

Creepy, though. See The Gormanston Foxes.

| Death · Oddities

Legal Ode

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In 1983 a driver hit a tree in Michigan. A tree surgeon repaired the damage, and the driver’s insurance paid the $550 bill, but the tree’s owner claimed $15,000 for pain and suffering; he said the “beautiful oak” was like someone dear to him.

A lower court threw out the case, and the appeals court agreed. The three-judge panel declared:

We thought that we would never see
A suit to compensate a tree,
A suit whose claim in tort is prest
Upon a mangled tree’s behest;
A tree whose battered trunk was prest
Against a Chevy’s crumpled crest;
A tree that faces each new day
With bark and limb in disarray;
A tree that may forever bear
A lasting need for tender care.
Flora lovers though we three,
We must uphold the court’s decree.
Affirmed.

(Fisher v. Lowe, 122 Mich. App. 418, 33 N.W.2d 67)

| Poems

The Greenwich Time Lady

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Ruth Belville sold time. Each day she would set her watch by the Greenwich clock in London and then charge a fee for the privilege of looking at her watch.

Belville’s father had established the business in 1836, when such knowledge was valuable — as railways revolutionized European travel, individual towns had to abandon their non-uniform local times, reckoned by the sun, and adopt instead the standard London time that dominated rail schedules.

For a confusing few years the nation underwent a sort of fugue, with public clocks displaying both London and local time; a few great clocks were even fitted with two minute hands. (In Dombey and Son Dickens notes these changes mournfully, “as if the sun itself had given in.”)

But by 1880 the British government had finally established a single standard time for the nation, and when Ruth Belville began selling time in 1892 she was already an anachronism. Remarkably, she continued until 1940, after the advent of World War II — by which time most of her clients were clockmakers.

(Thanks, Luke.)

| Society