hippomaniacally
adv. in a manner reminiscent of a mad horse
frample
v. of a horse: to paw the ground
accoy
v. to quiet or soothe
tournure
n. graceful manner or bearing
In an 1884 letter, Augustus Hare noted that the Bishop of Lichfield drove horses named Pride and Prejudice. “He says people may consider it a terrible thing for a bishop to be drawn hither and thither by these passions, but then it is assuredly a fine thing to have them well under control.”
When an editor complained that Gerald Kersh used too many long words, Kersh bet him £50 that he could write a story entirely in monosyllables. Kersh won:
We met on the stairs of Time: I was on my way up; he was on his way down. I was young; he was old, and poor — so poor that he did not know when luck would send him a meal and a bed.
Frederic Birmingham published the whole three-page story in his 1958 book The Writer’s Craft.
TO WIDOWERS AND SINGLE GENTLEMEN. — WANTED by a lady, a SITUATION to superintend the household and preside at table. She is Agreeable, Becoming, Careful, Desirable, English, Facetious, Generous, Honest, Industrious, Judicious, Keen, Lively, Merry, Natty, Obedient, Philosophic, Quiet, Regular, Sociable, Tasteful, Useful, Vivacious, Womanish, Xantippish, Youthful, Zealous, &c. Address X. Y. Z., Simmond’s Library, Edgeware-road.
— Times, 1842
condisciple
n. a fellow student
precariat
n. people whose living standards are insecure
scripturiency
n. passion for writing
refocillation
n. imparting of new vigor
This brass plate is displayed at the corner of Drummond Street and South Bridge, near Rutherford’s Bar, in Edinburgh:
(Thanks, Nick.)
A right-handed writer named Wright
In writing write always wrote rite
When he meant to write write.
If he’d written write right,
Wright would not have wrought rot writing rite.
— Anonymous
10/22/2024 UPDATE: Interesting addendum from reader Mark Thompson: The capital cities Asunción, Canberra, and Kuwait City are nearly equidistant on great-circle routes:
Kuwait City to Canberra: 12,768 km
Canberra to Asunción: 12,712 km
Asunción to Kuwait City: 12,766 km
“Their mutual distances apart (along the earth’s surface) happen to be very close to one Earth-diameter [12,742 km]: so, sadly, they don’t all lie on a single great circle (since pi is not 3).” (Thanks, Mark.)
Modern punctuation doesn’t always do the job, so writers have suggested various improvements. In the 1580s, English printer Henry Denham proposed a “percontation point,” ⸮, to be used at the end of a rhetorical question. In 1668, Anglican clergyman John Wilkins suggested using an inverted exclamation point, ¡, for the same purpose.
In the 1840s, Belgian newspaper publisher Marcellin Jobard introduced a small arrow whose orientation might indicate irony, irritation, indignation, or hesitation.
In 1899, French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested a point d’ironie to indicate that a sentence was ironic or sarcastic:
And in a 1966 essay, French writer Hervé Bazin proposed (left to right) the irony point, the doubt point, the conviction point, the acclamation point, the authority point, and the love point:
None of these has caught on, but the interrobang, ‽, introduced in 1962 by Martin Speckter to denote a question expressed in an exclamatory manner, is still included in many fonts.
More at Type Talk.
The farmer leads no E Z life,
The C D sows will rot,
And when at E V rests from strife
His bosom will A K lot.
In D D has to struggle hard
to E K living out,
If I C frosts do not retard
His crops, there’ll B A drought.
The hired L P has to pay
Are awful A Z too;
They C K rest when he’s away,
Nor N E work will do.
Both N Z cannot make to meet,
And then for A D takes
Some boarders, who so R T eat,
That E no money makes.
Of little U C finds this life,
Sick in old A G lies;
The debts he O Z leaves his wife,
And then in P C dies.
— Stenography, January 1887
Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet. At a lecture the following year he described more specifically a method by which pictures might be encoded using 26 alphabetical characters, which could then be transmitted over a distance in 5-character “words,” in effect creating a low-resolution visual telegraph. As a study he reduced this profile of a Greek girl to 271 coded dots, which he found yielded “a very creditable production.”
This had huge implications, he felt. In 1896 he imagined a whole correspondence with a civilization of intelligent ants on Mars; in three and a half hours they catch our attention; teach us their base-8 mathematical notation; demonstrate their shared understanding of certain celestial bodies and mathematical constants; and finally propose a specified 24-gon in which points can be situated by code, like stitches in a piece of embroidery.
That opens a limitless avenue for colloquy — the Martians send images of Saturn, Earth, the solar system, and domestic and sociological drawings, a new one every evening. Galton concludes that two astronomical bodies that are close enough to signal one another with flashes of light already have everything they need to establish “an efficient inter-stellar language.”