“Webster’s” means nothing. The word entered the public domain when the copyright lapsed on Noah Webster’s original dictionary in the 19th century. The name still conveys authority, though, so it’s become a marketing ploy among dictionary publishers, who display it even on books that have no connection to Webster’s original work. You can, too, if you like.
Twenty-five basketball teams compete in a knockout tournament — each team is eliminated after its first loss. How many games must be played to establish a winner?
In 1728 the city of Paris defaulted on a large number of municipal bonds. As a way to offer some restitution, the city decided to sponsor a series of lotteries among the disappointed bondholders. There would be only a few winners, but each investor could at least hope to recoup some of his lost money.
That’s very noble, but the city fathers had overlooked two things. First, because the government had sweetened the pot, the value of the lottery prize vastly exceeded the combined cost of the tickets. And second, among the bondholders were Voltaire and Charles Marie de La Condamine, who realized this.
The two organized a syndicate to buy up all of their fellow bondholders’ tickets, essentially guaranteeing themselves a huge profit each month. They did this systematically for half a year before the government caught on; when confronted, they pointed out that they were doing nothing illegal. In all, the syndicate realized 6 to 7 million francs, of which Voltaire kept half a million — enough to leave him independently wealthy for the rest of his life.
Lewis Carroll’s father was rector at St. Peter’s Church in Croft-on-Tees. On a tour of the church in 1992, Joel Birenbaum noticed a stone carving of a cat’s head on the chancel’s east wall, a few feet above the floor. When he dropped to his knees and looked at it from a child’s perspective, the cat’s mouth assumed a broad grin.
His discovery appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune on July 13, 1992.
1. P-K4 P-K4 2. B-B4 P-R4 3. Q-B3 P-R4 4. QxP mate:
That’s a pretty colorless chess game, but Mike Keith points out that the game score makes an alphametic:
P-K4 + P-K4 + B-B4 + P-R4 + Q-B3 + P-R4 + QxP = IWIN
Replace each letter and symbol (-, x) with a digit, leaving the numbers as they are, to produce a valid equation.
Let the peal of a gong be heard in the last half of a minute, a second peal in the preceding 1/4 minute, a third peal in the 1/8 minute before that, etc. ad infinitum. … Of particular interest is the following puzzling case. Let us assume that each peal is so very loud that, upon hearing it, anyone is struck deaf — totally and permanently. At the end of the minute we shall be completely deaf (any one peal being sufficient), but we shall not have heard a single peal! For at most we could have heard only one of the peals (any single peal striking one deaf instantly), and which peal could we have heard? There simply was no first peal.
— Jose Benardete, Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics, 1964
In Little Dorrit, Chapter 33, Tattycoram appears with “an iron box some two feet square” in her arms. Writes Ebenezer Brewer in his Reader’s Handbook of Famous Names in Fiction, “She must have been a pretty strong girl, with very long arms.”
perpession
n. the endurance of suffering
patible
adj. capable of being endured
longanimity
n. patient endurance of hardship
In an editorial on Dec. 10, 1903, the New York Times advised inventor Samuel Langley to stop experimenting with flying machines. “We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly. … For students and investigators of the Langley type there are more useful employments.”
One week later, the Wright brothers made their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.
One such error is understandable, but 17 years later the Times made essentially the same mistake.