Misc

  • The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
  • Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
  • A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
  • Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
  • “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams

“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning

Less Art

Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy rendered in Anglic, a simplified system of English spelling proposed in 1930 by Swedish philologist Robert Eugen Zachrisson:

To be, or not to be: that is the questshon:
Whedher ’tis noebler in the miend to sufer
The slingz and aroz of outraejus fortuen,
Or to taek armz agaenst a see of trublz,
And by opoezing end them? To die: to sleep;
Noe mor; and by a sleep to sae we end
The hart-aek and the thouzend natueral shoks
That flesh is aer to, ’tis a konsumaeshon
Devoutli to be wisht. To die, to sleep;
To sleep! perchaans to dreem: ie, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of deth what dreemz mae kum,
When we hav shufled off this mortl koil,
Must giv us pauz: there’s the respekt
That maeks kalamiti of soe long lief.

The Gettysburg Address would begin: “Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberti, and dedikaeted to the propozishon that aul men are kreaeted eequel.”

Interloper

The first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) contains a fictitious entry, presumably to catch content thieves:

hink, hinks, hinking, hinked. If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something.

Phony or not, this is a useful word. If it’s adopted widely enough, perhaps the dictionary entry will bootstrap itself into legitimacy.

Epithet

[Screenwriter Harry] Kurnitz’ most quoted observation was made when he became involved in a running feud with Lynn Loesser, then the wife of Frank Loesser, the songwriter.

‘Lynn,’ Kurnitz said, ‘is the evil of two Loessers.’

— Richard Gehman, “The Little World of Harry Kurnitz,” Playboy, June 1958

Ready to Hand

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligrafie,_Jan_Van_De_Velde_(1605).jpg

Synonyms for WRITER’S CRAMP collected by Dmitri Borgmann in 1987:

CHIROSPASM
WRITERS’ PALSY
GRAPHOSPASM
SCRIVENERS’ PALSY
MOGIGRAPHIA or MOGOGRAPHIA
PENMAN’S SPASM
WRITERS’ NEUROSIS
HYPERKINESIA
DYSGRAPHIA
WRITERS’ SPASM
A STUTTERING OF THE HAND

MOGIGRAPHIA has four principal forms: SPASTIC, PARALYTIC, NEURALGIC, and TREMULOUS. Borgmann wrote, “No longer need you suffer from the WRITER’S CRAMP of the masses — you can, instead, discourse eloquently and frequently about the plethora of more elegant-sounding ailments that I have made available to you!”

(Dmitri A. Borgmann, “Quelque Chose,” Word Ways 20:1 [February 1987], 44-53.)

Read It Aloud

Center Alley worse jester pore ladle gull hoe lift wetter stop-murder an toe heft-cisterns. Daze worming war furry wicket an shellfish parsons, spatially dole stop-murder, hoe dint lack Center Alley an, infect, word orphan traitor pore gull mar lichen ammonol dinner hormone bang. Oily inner moaning disk wicket oiled worming shorted, ‘Center Alley, gad otter bet, an goiter wark! Suture lacy ladle bomb! Shaker lake!’ an firm moaning tell gnat disk ratchet gull word heifer wark lacquer hearse toe kipper horsing ardor, washer heft-cistern’s closing, maker bets, gore tutor star fur perversions, cooker males, washer dashes an doe oily udder hoard wark. Nor wander pore Center Alley worse tarred an disgorged!

— Howard L. Chace, Anguish Languish, 1956

Limerick

A certified poet from Slough,
Whose methods of rhyming were rough,
Retorted, “I see
That the letters agree
And if that’s not sufficient I’m through.”

— Clifford Witting

In a Word

stillicide
n. the dropping of rainwater from the eaves of a house upon another’s land or roof

sub tegmine fagi
adv. under the cover of a beech tree

tenson
n. a contest in verse between rival troubadours

Selflessness

Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:

She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”