Misc

  • When written in all caps, the title of John Hiatt’s song “Have a Little Faith in Me” contains no curves.
  • Tycho Brahe kept a tame elk.
  • It isn’t known whether the sum of π and e is irrational.
  • Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, and James Garfield died without wills.
  • “Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The medieval Latin riddle In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (“We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”) is a palindrome. The answer is “moths.”

| History · Language · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

In a Word

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WSG_by_Holl.jpg

perstringe
v. to criticize

dispendious
adj. costly

connictation
n. a twinkling or winking with the eye

An example of the quick wit of W.S. Gilbert, from actor Rutland Barrington’s 1908 memoir:

“On one occasion, when rehearsing Pinafore, he said, ‘Cross left on that speech, I think, Barrington, and sit on the skylight over the saloon pensively.’ I did so, but the stage carpenter had only sewn the thing together with packthread, and when I sat on it it collapsed entirely, whereupon he said like lightning, ‘That’s expensively!'”

| Humor · Language

Lost in Translation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:North_Korea_Propaganda_Photograph_of_prisoners_of_the_USS_Pueblo,_with_the_Hawaiian_Good_Luck_Sign,_1968.jpg

In January 1968, North Korea captured the American spy vessel Pueblo and held 82 crew members captive for 11 months. During the crisis, the North Korean government released the photo above, claiming that the Americans were apologetic and cooperating with their captors.

The Americans managed to send a different message — three of them are extending their middle fingers. They had told the Koreans this was a “Hawaiian good luck sign.”

Commander Lloyd M. Bucher found a way to accomplish the same thing verbally — he wrote the confession “We paean the DPRK [North Korea]. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung.”

| History · Language

One-Sided Story

In the runup to Thailand’s 2001 elections, Thai Rak Thai party founder Thaksin Shinawatra faced allegations of corruption. The Bangkok Post‘s “week in review” email examined the charges against him, his attempts avoid the media, his reputation, and the Internet’s reaction. It used these paragraph headings:

Thaksin cited
Thaksin sighted
Thaksin slighted
Thaksin sited

In Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction, Hazel K. Bell writes, “Clearly the editor is an indexer manqué.”

| Language

In a Word

aeolistic
adj. long-winded

[Edmund] Falconer’s Oonagh, or, The Lovers of Lismona opened one evening in 1866 at half-past seven. By midnight most of the audience had left; by two o’clock in the morning only a few sleeping critics were still there. At three o’clock the stage crew brought the curtain down with the action still in progress and the play was taken off.

— The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre, 2013

| Language

Figures

The word cliché was originally the French name for a printing plate that was prepared for convenience to print a commonly used phrase. The plates clicked as they were being used, and cliché is the past participle of clicher, a variant of cliquer, “to click.”

Interestingly, another name for this plate is stereotype.

| Language

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1815-regency-proposal-woodcut.gif

agamy
n. absence of marriage; the state or condition of being unmarried

viripotent
adj. (of a woman) physically fit for marriage

affidation
n. sworn confirmation of one’s intent to marry

deuterogamy
n. marriage a second time

| Language

Bad Music

In the November 2009 issue of Word Ways, Richard Lederer lists his favorite “eye rhymes” — if English made any sense, these would sound alike:

  • hoist–soloist
  • unit–whodunit
  • cared–infrared
  • stately–philately
  • radios–adios
  • only–wantonly
  • overage–coverage

Even worse: beat–great–sweat–caveat–whereat and bough–dough–enough–hiccough– lough–through–trough–thorough.

And shouldn’t encourage rhyme with entourage?

12/15/2015 A related image, from reader Jon Jerome:

radio shack adios

| Language