Love is a verb.
In that sentence, is love a noun or a verb?
Author: Greg Ross
Hoofbeats
When I think of a unicorn, what I am thinking of is certainly not nothing; if it were nothing, then, when I think of a griffin, I should also be thinking of nothing, and there would be no difference between thinking of a griffin and thinking of a unicorn. But there certainly is a difference; and what can the difference be except that in the one case what I am thinking of is a unicorn, and in the other a griffin? And if the unicorn is what I am thinking of, then there certainly must be a unicorn, in spite of the fact that unicorns are unreal. In other words, though in one sense of the words there certainly are no unicorns–that sense, namely, in which to assert that there are would be equivalent to asserting that unicorns are real–yet there must be some other sense in which there are such things; since, if there were not, we could not think of them.
— G.E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1922
Black and White
The Bach-Peters Paradox
Pronouns refer to nouns. In the sentence Francis touched the beggar and cured him, we can “unpack” the pronoun him by replacing it with its referent, the beggar: Francis touched the beggar and cured the beggar.
But what if a sentence has two phrases that refer to each other? The pilot that shot at it hit the Mig that chased him. Now there’s an infinite regress:
The pilot that shot at the Mig that chased the pilot that shot at it hit the Mig that chased the pilot that shot at it.
It seems that no amount of unpacking can resolve these pronouns. Yet most readers can understand the sentence immediately. How are they able to do so?
A Prayer
It deals with a game that [Theodore] Roosevelt and I used to play at Sagamore Hill. After an evening of talk, perhaps about the fringes of knowledge, or some new possibility of climbing inside the minds and senses of animals, we would go out on the lawn, where we took turns at an amusing little astronomical rite. We searched until we found, with or without glasses, the faint, heavenly spot of light-mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, when one or the other of us would then recite:
That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It is 750,000 light-years away.
It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.After an interval Colonel Roosevelt would grin at me and say: ‘Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed.’
— William Beebe, The Book of Naturalists, 1944
Lego Math
To divide 8101265822784 by 8, move the 8 from the number’s head to its tail.
To multiply 1034482758620689655172413793 by 3, move the 3 from the tail to the head.
King Without a Country
Pity James Harden-Hickey — he founded a nation and no one believed him.
In 1893, newly rich after marrying into steel money, the American adventurer stopped at the empty island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic (not its larger namesake in the Caribbean) and, fancying a military dictatorship, proclaimed himself James I.
To his credit, Harden-Hickey did everything he could to legitimize his claim, but it’s hard to get these things off the ground. He named a secretary of state; opened a consular office in New York; established a flag, postage stamps, and a coat of arms; and began to sell bonds. After only two years, though, Britain seized the island for a telegraph station, occasioning a dispute with Brazil, and Harden-Hickey’s protests brought him only ridicule in the popular press.
Bold to the last, Harden-Hickey even tried to arrange an invasion of England from Ireland, but he couldn’t arrange financing. In 1898 he took an overdose of morphine, leaving behind a note to his wife–and the crown of his quondam nation.
Ancestor Guilt
Jones had been greatly depressed; he declared himself a murderer, and would not be comforted. Suddenly he asked me a question. ‘Are not the parents the cause of the birth of their children?’ said he. ‘I suppose so,’ said I. ‘Are not all men mortal?’ ‘That also may be admitted.’ ‘Then are not the parents the cause of the death of their children, since they know that they are mortal? And am I not a murderer?’ I was, I own, puzzled. At last I thought of something soothing. I pointed out to Jones that to cause the death of another was not necessarily murder. It might be manslaughter or justifiable homicide. ‘Of which of these then am I guilty?’ he queried. I could not say because I had never seen the Jones family, but I hear Jones has become a great bore in the asylum by his unceasing appeals to every one to tell him whether he has committed murder, manslaughter, or justifiable homicide!
— F.C.S. Schiller, quoted in Ralph L. Woods, How to Torture Your Mind, 1969
Unquote
“From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.” — Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930
Fringe Sect
In 1918, Bertrand Russell was sentenced to six months in prison for writing an antiwar essay.
I was much cheered in my arrival by the warder at the gate who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.’
“This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.”