“Pleasant is the glittering of the sun today upon these margins because it flickers so.”
— An anonymous medieval monk writing in a manuscript of Cassiodorus, quoted in Nora Chadwick’s The Celts, 1971
Literature
Worldly Wise
Proverbs from around the world:
- Don’t buy someone else’s problems. (Chinese)
- Strange smoke irritates the eyes. (Lithuanian)
- The poor lack much, but the greedy more. (Swiss)
- It is the mind that wins or loses. (Nepalese)
- The point of the needle must pass first. (Ethiopian)
- God did not create hurry. (Finnish)
- When you go, the road is rough; when you return, smooth. (Thai)
- If you want to marry wisely, marry your equal. (Spanish)
- Where is there a tree not shaken by the wind? (Armenian)
- Wherever you go, you can’t get rid of yourself. (Polish)
- Money swore an oath that nobody that did not love it should ever have it. (Irish)
- Character is habit long continued. (Greek)
- Where you were born is less important than how you live. (Turkish)
- It is better to prevent than to cure. (Peruvian)
- Don’t do all you can, spend all you have, believe all you hear, or tell all you know. (English)
- Better is better. (German)
(From Reynold Feldman and Cynthia Voelke, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom, 1992.)
Early Adopter
At the start of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, the Time Traveller explains to his friends that “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and — Duration.” This idea, of conceiving time as a fourth dimension, had been broached in the 18th century, but it had first been treated seriously in a mysterious letter to Nature in 1885:
“I [propose] to consider Time as a fourth dimension of our existence. … Since this fourth dimension cannot be introduced into space, as commonly understood, we require a new kind of space for its existence, which we may call time-space.”
The letter writer identified himself only as “S.” Was this Wells? Apparently not: In his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography Wells wrote, “In the universe in which my brain was living in 1879 there was no nonsense about time being space or anything of that sort. There were three dimensions, up and down, fore and aft and right and left, and I never heard of a fourth dimension until 1884 or there-about. Then I thought it was a witticism.”
So someone had anticipated Wells’ idea by a full decade. As far as I know, his identity has never been discovered.
(Via Paul J. Nahin, Holy Sci-Fi!, 2014.)
Pseudonyms
Fictitious correspondents invented by T.S. Eliot in kick-starting a letters page in The Egoist in 1917:
The Rev. Charles James Grimble
Muriel A. Schwarz
Charles Augustus Conybeare
Helen B. Trundlett
J.A.D. Spence
Apparently this wasn’t unusual for Eliot, who wrote for The Tyro in 1921 as Gus Krutzsch. When I.A. Richards invited Krutzsch to meet him in Peking, Eliot replied, “I do not care to visit any country which has no native cheese.”
As a hedge against hard times, W.C. Fields used to open bank accounts under assumed names, including Sneed Hearn, Dr. Otis Guelpe, Figley E. Whitesides, and Professor Curtis T. Bascom.
“He had bank accounts, or at least safe-deposit boxes, in such cities as London, Paris, Sydney, Cape Town, and Suva,” said his friend Gene Fowler in 1949. “I do not know this for a fact, but I think that much of his fortune still rests in safe-deposit boxes about which, deliberately or not, he said nothing.”
Spirit
In November 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a volume of Apuleius from the Bristol Library.
In the borrowers’ register, in place of the date, he wrote, “9 Dutch ships taken, with 3000 troops Bravo.”
In a Word
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.”
Travel Literature
For decades, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. kept a record of the books he read. Pleasingly, the last entry is Thornton Wilder’s 1935 novel Heaven’s My Destination.
In Winter Rules, George Gardner Herrick claims that the book was not to be found in Holmes’ library in Washington or Massachusetts. I can’t confirm that, though.
Sort of related: The definition of confection in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language contains this quotation:
Of best things then, what world shall yield confection
To liken her?
Shakespeare.
In 1893 a correspondent to Notes and Queries pointed out that this passage appears nowhere in Shakespeare. “I have just now found it in [Sir Philip Sidney’s] ‘Arcadia,’ book i, the eclogue of Thyrsis and Dorus. Clearly he quoted from memory. What a memory the man had! — and how careless he sometimes was in trusting it.”
Misc
- NUTHATCH and UNTHATCH are nearly the same word.
- Vladivostok is farther south than Venice.
- Thackeray called George IV’s prose style “lax, maudlin slipslop.”
- dollop reads the same upside down.
- “I shall stipulate that I will only go into Heaven on condition that I am never in a room with more than ten people.” — Edward Lear
On the Money
In their 1943 handbook The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note that writers are prone to exaggerate descriptions of quantity and duration. “There should never be any doubt left as to how much, or how long.” They offer this quantified example:
(100%) Mr. Jordan’s fortune consisted wholly of bar-gold.
(99%) Practically all his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(95%) His fortune consisted almost entirely of bar-gold.
(90%) Nearly all his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(80%) By far the greater part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(70%) The greater part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(60%) More than half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(55%) Rather more than half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(50%) Half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(45%) Nearly half his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(40%) A large part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(35%) Quite a large part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(30%) A considerable part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(25%) Part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(15%) A small part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(10%) Not much of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(5%) A very small part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(1%) An inconsiderable part of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
(0%) None of his fortune consisted of bar-gold.
“This simple, generally accepted, scale is confused by writers who, for dramatic effect, try to make 5% seem more than it is.”
Org Chart
Say what you will about hell, it’s very well organized. According to the 17th-century grimoire Ars Goetia, the underworld is ruled by 72 demons, each with its own sigil (above) and served by a sort of infernal bureaucracy:
Aim (also Aym or Haborym) is a Great Duke of Hell, very strong, and rules over twenty-six legions of demons. He sets cities, castles and great places on fire, makes men witty in all ways, and gives true answers concerning private matters. He is depicted as a man (handsome to some sources), but with three heads, one of a serpent, the second of a man, and the third of a cat to most authors, although some say of a calf, riding a viper, and carrying in his hand a lit firebrand with which he sets the requested things on fire.
Wikipedia has a page explaining who does what.
Related: Belphegor’s prime, 1000000000000066600000000000001, is a palindromic prime number with 666 at its heart and 13 zeros on either side. It was discovered by Harvey Dubner; Clifford Pickover named it after a prince of hell responsible for helping people make ingenious inventions and discoveries.