Veritas

What Robert Benchley learned in his first year at Harvard:

  1. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
  2. By placing one paper bag inside another paper bag you can carry home a milk shake in it.
  3. There is a double l in the middle of parallel.
  4. Powder rubbed on the chin will take the place of a shave if the room isn’t very light.
  5. French nouns ending in “aison” are feminine.
  6. Almost everything you need to know about a subject is in the encyclopedia.
  7. A tasty sandwich can be made by spreading peanut butter on raisin bread.
  8. A floating body displaces its own weight in the liquid in which it floats.
  9. A sock with a hole in the toe can be worn inside out with comparative comfort.
  10. The chances are against filling an inside straight.
  11. There is a law in economics called The Law of Diminishing Returns, which means that after a certain margin is reached returns begin to diminish. This may not be correctly stated, but there is a law by that name.
  12. You begin tuning a mandolin with A and tune the other strings from that.

“My courses were all selected with a very definite aim in view, with a serious purpose in mind,” he wrote. “No classes before eleven in the morning or after two-thirty in the afternoon, and nothing on Saturday at all. On that rock was my education built.”

| Humor · Society

“The Werewolf”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L,antiguo.jpg

One night an errant Werewolf fled
His wife and child and visited
A village teacher’s sepulchre
And begged him: “Conjugate me, sir!”

The village teacher then awoke
And standing on his scutcheon spoke
Thus to the beast, who made his seat
With crossed paws at the dead man’s feet:

“The Werewolf,” said that honest wight,
“The Willwolf — future, am I right?
The Wouldwolf — wolf conditional,
The Beowulf — father of them all!”

These tenses had a pleasing sound,
The Werewolf rolled his eyeballs round,
And begged him, as he’d gone so far,
Add plural to the singular.

The village teacher scratched his head;
He’d never heard of that, he said.
Though there were “wolves” in packs and swarms,
Of “were” could be no plural forms!

There werewolf rose up blind with tears
— He’s had a wife and child for years!
But being ignorant of letters
He went home thankful to his betters.

— Christian Morgenstern

| Language · Poems

Gumshoe Polish

In 1930 Dashiell Hammett reviewed mystery fiction for the New York Evening Post. Dismayed at the blunders he encountered, he published 24 “suggestions that might be of value to somebody.” Excerpts:

  • The Colt’s .45 automatic pistol has no chambers. The cartridges are put in a magazine.
  • When a bullet from a Colt’s .45, or any firearm of approximately the same size and power, hits you, even if not in a fatal spot, it usually knocks you over. It is quite upsetting at any reasonable range.
  • When you are knocked unconscious you do not feel the blow that does it.
  • Fingerprints of any value to the police are seldom found on anybody’s skin.
  • Not nearly so much can be seen by moonlight as you imagine. This is especially true of colors.
  • Ventriloquists do not actually “throw” their voices and such doubtful illusions as they manage depend on their gestures. Nothing at all could be done by a ventriloquist standing behind his audience.
  • Even detectives who drop their final g’s should not be made to sayin “anythin'” — an oddity that calls for vocal acrobatics.
  • “Youse” is the plural of “you.”
  • A lawyer cannot impeach his own witness.

Also: “A trained detective shadowing a subject does not ordinarily leap from doorway to doorway and does not hide behind trees and poles. He knows no harm is done if the subject sees him now and then.”

| Literature

Current Affairs

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

Here’s a long corridor with a moving walkway. Let’s race to the far end and back. We’ll both run at the same speed, but you run on the floor and I’ll run on the walkway, going “downstream” to the far end and “upstream” back to this point. Who will win?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

In a Word

logodaedalus
n. an inventor of words and phrases

I once had the honour of meeting a philosopher called McIndoe
Who had once had the honour of being flung out of an upstairs window.
During his flight, he said, he commenced an interesting train of speculation
On why there happened to be such a word as defenestration.

There is not, he said, a special word for being rolled down a roof into a gutter;
There is no verb to describe the action of beating a man to death with a putter;
No adjective exists to qualify a man bound to the buffer of the 12.10 to Ealing,
No abstract noun to mollify a man hung upside down by his ankles from the ceiling.

Why, then, of all the possible offences so distressing to humanitarians,
Should this one alone have caught the attention of the verbarians?
I concluded (said McIndoe) that the incidence of logodaedaly was purely adventitious.
About a thirtieth of a second later, I landed in a bush that my great-aunt brought back from Mauritius.

I am aware (he said) that defenestration is not limited to the flinging of men through the window.
On this occasion, however, it was so limited, the object defenestrated being I, the philosopher, McIndoe.

— R.P. Lister

| Language

American Notes

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PostcardOshkoshWIStMarysHospitalCirca1907.jpg

It must be confessed at the outset that Oshkosh is not a beautiful word. Its pronunciation is suggestive of a man struggling with a mouthful of hot mush, and to the irreverent it is a perfect rhyme to ‘gosh.’ But, on the other hand, the word has its advantages. It is an ideal word for advertising purposes. Once heard the word cannot be forgotten. Furthermore, to say that one comes from Oshkosh is in itself a mark of distinction. To be sure, few persons do come from Oshkosh. They are afraid of being made fun of, but when they do wander from the Oshkosh fireside, they attract as much attention as the pachyderm contingent of a circus parade. In a drawing-room the citizen from Oshkosh is the cynosure of all eyes, and he need fear but three rivals–the man from Kalamazoo, the man from Kokomo, and the man from Keokuk.

— Rochester Post Express, March 26, 1911

| Language

Travel Talk

Useless phrases drawn from actual phrasebooks by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall, from Limits of Language, 2006:

  • At what time were these branches eaten by the rhinoceros?
  • I don’t play the violin, but I love cheese.
  • I have my own syringe.
  • I had a suckling-brother, who died at the most tender age.
  • The beast had a human body, the feet of a buck, and a horn on its head.
  • Because I was out buying a pair of wooden shoes.
  • I had yams and fish for two days, and then I ate fern roots.
  • I want a specimen of your urine.
  • The corpse will be taken to Tonga.

A Chechen manual includes the phrase “Don’t shoot!”

See Enjoy Your Stay.

| Language

Invention and Dispatch

http://books.google.com/books?id=qUYOAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

While [Thomas Edison was] an operator at one station, the telegraph office was greatly infested with cockroaches. Mr. Edison tacked several zinc strips to the walls at intervals of an eighth of an inch, and applied the positive and negative poles of a battery alternately to the strips. He next smeared the walls above the strips with molasses. The long legged bugs came up, and as they stepped from strip to strip, they ‘closed the circuit,’ received the electric shock and dropped dead by scores. Water pails put at the proper places received their bodies as they fell.

— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879

| Technology

Antipodes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antipodes_LAEA.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

What is directly on the opposite side of the world from you? This map answers that question by superimposing each point on earth with its opposite. Some notable sisters:

  • Beijing, China, is nearly opposite Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Madrid, Spain, is nearly opposite Wellington, New Zealand
  • Bogotá, Colombia, is nearly opposite Jakarta, Indonesia
  • Bangkok, Thailand, is nearly opposite Lima, Peru
  • Quito, Ecuador, is nearly opposite Singapore
  • Seoul, South Korea, is nearly opposite Montevideo, Uruguay
  • Perth, Australia, is nearly opposite Bermuda
  • Charmingly, Cherbourg, France, is opposite the Antipodes Islands south of New Zealand

W.V.O. Quine explains how an enterprising traveler can arrange to visit two precise antipodes: “Note to begin with that any route from New York to Los Angeles, if not excessively devious, is bound to intersect any route from Winnipeg to New Orleans. Now let someone travel from New York to Los Angeles, and also travel from roughly the antipodes of Winnipeg to roughly the antipodes of New Orleans. These two routes do not intersect — far from it; but one of them intersects a route that is antipodal to the other. So our traveler is assured of having touched a pair of mutually antipodal points precisely, though he will know only approximately where.”

| Science & Math

Dueling Expectations

In 2007, New Scientist announced that the best strategy in a game of rock paper scissors is to choose scissors.

Research has shown that rock is the most popular of the three moves. If your opponent expects you to choose it, he’ll choose paper in order to beat it — in which case scissors will win.

In 2005 a Japanese art collector asked Christie’s and Sotheby’s to play a match, saying the winner could sell his impressionist paintings. The 11-year-old daughter of a Christie’s director recommended scissors, saying, “Everybody expects you to choose rock.”

Sure enough, Sotheby’s chose paper, and Christie’s won the £10 million deal.

| Science & Math