Anagrams on Dickens titles:
“We talk about the tyranny of words,” writes David Copperfield, “but we like to tyrannize over them too.”
What’s the difference between six dozen dozen and half a dozen dozen?
If you answered “nothing,” reconsider.
vernalagnia
adj. heightened sexual desire in the springtime
In 1610, thinking he had discovered two moons orbiting Saturn, Galileo composed a message:
ALTISSIMUM PLANETAM TERGEMINUM OBSERVAVI (“I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form”)
… and sent it to Kepler as an anagram:
SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS
Remarkably, Kepler managed to “solve” this as a message about Mars, not Saturn:
SALVE UMBISTENEUM GEMINATUM MARTIA PROLES (“Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars”)
The German astronomer had predicted that the Red Planet had two moons, and imagined that Galileo was confirming his belief.
There’s a message in this, somewhere.
The autobiography of the American eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748-1806) contains 8,847 words and no punctuation:
IME the first Lord in the younited States of Americary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt A Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare then goue on all is Easey Now …
When readers complained, he added a page of punctuation marks to the second edition, inviting them to “peper and solt it as thay plese.”
Of all the odd numbers, which would appear first in a dictionary?
EIGHT BILLION EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHT MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHT THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED EIGHTY-FIVE (8,808,808,885).
(Thanks, Michael.)
When, at the General Peace of 1814, Prussia absorbed a portion of Saxony, the king issued a new coinage of rix dollars, with their German name, EIN REICHSTAHLER, impressed on them. The Saxons, by dividing the word, EIN REICH STAHL ER, made a sentence of which the meaning is, ‘He stole a kingdom!’
— William T. Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
zenzizenzizenzic
n. a number raised to the eighth power
A medal struck of the 17th-century Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus included this motto:
ChrIstVs DuX ergo trIVMphVs
Rearrange the capital letters and you get MDCXVVVII, or 1627, the year in which the medal was stamped.
That’s a chronogram, and a pretty tame one, as these things go. In 1634 the Society of Jesuits at Brussels composed a remarkable congratulation to Ferdinand on his arrival in the Netherlands as governor; it contains 100 hexameters, every one of which is a chronogram adding to 1634:
AngeLe CoeLIVagI MIChaeL, LVX VnICa CaetVs.
Pro nVtV sVCCInCta tVo CVI CVnCta MInIstrant.
SIDera qVIqVe poLo gaVDentIa sIDera VoLVVnt. …
“Genius,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is an infinite capacity for taking pains.”
aidle
v. “to earn one’s bread indifferently well”
(Charles Mackay, Lost Beauties of the English Language, 1874)