Whole Story

breakaway table

Shopping at a mall one afternoon, Dave Morice and his son Danny came across a set of poseable wrestling action figures. One accessory was a breakaway table that came in two jagged halves. The store had a policy that allowed customers to return a broken toy for one that wasn’t broken.

Morice said, “Now here’s a problem. The table comes broken in two. If it wasn’t broken, then it would be broken. In either case, it’s broken.”

Danny said, “Yeah! That means we can take it back any time for a brand-new one.”

“That’s another problem,” Morice said. “They couldn’t replace it with one that wasn’t broken.”

(From Word Ways.)

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In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mes_chers_agneaux.jpg

philargyry
n. love of money

pismirism
n. hoarding of money; miserliness

ingordigious
adj. greedy, avaricious

pleonectic
adj. excessively covetous, avaricious, or greedy

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Words Without Language

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Backlit_keyboard.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In contemporary secretary schools, training emphasizes the inhibition of reading for meaning while typing, on the assumption that such reading will hinder high-speed performance. Some support for this assumption derives from the introspections of champion speed typists, who report that they seldom recall the meaning from the source material incidentally.

— William E. Cooper, Cognitive Aspects of Skilled Typewriting, 2012

We don’t even know the keyboard. A 2013 study at Vanderbilt asked 100 subjects to take a short typing test; they were then shown a blank QWERTY keyboard and given 80 seconds to label the keys. On average they typed at 72 words per minute with 94 percent accuracy but could correctly label only 15 letters on a blank keyboard.

“This demonstrates that we’re capable of doing extremely complicated things without knowing explicitly what we are doing,” said graduate student Kristy Snyder.

It had formerly been believed that typing starts as a conscious process that becomes unconscious with repetition. But it appears that typists never memorize the key locations in the first place.

“It appears that not only don’t we know much about what we are doing, but we can’t know it because we don’t consciously learn how to do it in the first place,” said psychologist Gordon Logan.

(Kristy M. Snyder et al., “What Skilled Typists Don’t Know About the QWERTY Keyboard,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 76:1 [January 2014], 162-171.)

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Misc

https://www.flickr.com/photos/pondapple/16890700391
Image: Flickr
  • At the equinox, the sun rises due east at every latitude.
  • UPPER TYPEWRITER ROW is typed on the upper row of a typewriter.
  • 32785 = 3 + 2 × 7 + 85
  • In the Mbabaram Aboriginal language of north Queensland, dog means dog.
  • The London Times has published no obituary for Sherlock Holmes. Therefore he exists.

(Thanks, Sanford.)

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Ellison Words

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harlan_Ellison_at_the_LA_Press_Club_19860712.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison typed more than 1,700 works using a single finger of each hand. In 1999 Mike Keith set out to learn which words would be easiest for him to type. “Easy” means that successive letters are typed by alternate hands and that the hands travel as little as possible. (See the article for some other technicalities.)

Here are the easiest words of 4 to 13 letters; the score in parenthesis is the total linear distance traveled by the fingers, normalized by dividing by the length of the word (lower is better):

DODO, PAPA, TUTU (0.00)
DODOS, NINON (0.20)
BANANA (0.17)
AUSTERE (0.77)
TEREBENE (0.53)
ABATEMENT (1.12)
MAHARAJAS (0.88)
PROHIBITORY (1.15)
MONOTONICITY (1.19)
MONONUCLEOSIS (1.05)

Ellison could easily have used most of these in a story about an infectious disease outbreak in India. But I guess that might have looked lazy.

(Michael Keith, “Typewriter Words,” Word Ways 32:4 [November 1999], 270-277.)

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Many-Sided Story

From Ed Southall’s Twitter feed, a polygon name builder:

https://twitter.com/solvemymaths/status/1118049237273649152

A 55-sided figure is a pentacontapentagon; one with 79 sides is a heptacontaenneagon. A system exists to go even higher: A figure with 9,000 sides is an enakischiliagon, and one with a million is a megagon.

René Descartes suggested the 1,000-sided chiliagon as an example of a thing that can be considered without being explicitly imagined; one “does not imagine the thousand sides or see them as if they were present.” So the intellect is not dependent on imagination.

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Shibboleths

In a 1954 essay, “The English Aristocracy,” Nancy Mitford observed that English class consciousness had permeated the language itself, so that using the wrong term betrayed a lack of breeding. She had been inspired by linguist Alan S.C. Ross, who distinguished upper-class (“U”) terms from those used by the middle class:

U Non-U
Bike or Bicycle Cycle
Dinner jacket Dress suit
Knave (cards) Jack
Vegetables Greens
Ice Ice cream
Scent Perfume
They’ve a very nice house They have (got) a lovely home
Ill (in bed) Sick (in bed)
Looking-glass Mirror
Chimneypiece Mantelpiece
Graveyard Cemetery
Spectacles Glasses
False teeth Dentures
Die Pass on
Mad Mental
Jam Preserve
Napkin Serviette
Sofa Settee or couch
Lavatory or loo Toilet
Rich Wealthy
Good health Cheers
Lunch Dinner (for midday meal)
Pudding Sweet
Drawing-room Lounge
Writing-paper Note-paper
What? Pardon?
How d’you do? Pleased to meet you
Wireless Radio
(School)master, mistress Teacher

Ross added, “It is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished since they are neither cleaner, richer, nor better-educated than anybody else.” Mitford said she’d written the essay “In order to demonstrate the upper middle class does not merge imperceptibly into the middle class.”

The essay touched off a vigorous national debate about English snobbery; Mitford’s essay was published in a 1956 book, Noblesse Oblige, to which John Betjeman contributed a mordant poem, “How to Get On in Society”:

Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It’s ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule’s comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

(Alan S.C. Ross, “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 55:1 [1954], 20-56.)

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