In 1925 New York poet Eli Siegel composed the shortest poem in the English language. He called it “One Question”:
I.
Why?
The former record holder was an anonymous verse titled “On the Condition of the United States After Several Years of Prohibition”:
Wet
Yet.
You say that you have a dog.
Yes, and a villain of a one, said Ctesippus.
And he has puppies?
Yes, and they are very like himself.
And the dog is the father of them?
Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together.
And is he not yours?
To be sure he is.
Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.
Let me ask you one little question more, said Dionysodorus, quickly interposing, in order that Ctesippus might not get in his word: You beat this dog?
Ctesippus said, laughing: Indeed I do; and I only wish that I could beat you instead of him.
Then you beat your father, he said.
— Plato, Euthydemus
In central Bahrain stands a large mesquite known as the Tree of Life. It’s the only tree that survives in this part of the desert, and it’s been here for 400 years. No one knows where it’s finding water and nutrients.
See also Spectacularly Bad Driving.
imparlibidinous
adj. pertaining to an unequal state of desire between two people
A Lusitanian physician had a patient who insisted upon it he was perpetually frozen, and would sit before a great fire even in the dog-days. The Portuguese Esculapius procured him a dress of rough sheep skins, saturated with aqua vita, and set him on fire. The patient then declared he was quite warm, rather too much so, and was cured.
— Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822
More nouns of assemblage:
My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?
“Two apparent prints or impressions of the human foot in a tabular mass of limestone,” discussed in Schoolcraft’s Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, 1825:
The rock containing these interesting impressions is a compact limestone of a grayish blue color. It was originally quarried on the left bank of the Mississippi at St. Louis, and is a part of the extensive range of calcareous rocks upon which that town is built. Foundations of private dwellings, and the military works erected by the French and Spaniards, from this material, sixty years ago, are still as solid and unbroken as when first laid.
“The probability … of their having been imparted by some individual of a race of men who were unacquainted with the art of tanning skins, and at a period much anterior to that to which any tradition of the present race of Indians reaches, derives additional weight from this peculiar shape of the feet.”
Higgamus hoggamus
“Anton Von Leewenhoek
Has a small problem,” con-
Fided his wife.
“Microbiology
Doesn’t disturb me; his
Microanatomy’s
Blighting my life!”
— Theodore L. Drachman
2025 = (20 + 25)2
3025 = (30 + 25)2
9801 = (98 + 01)2
When the Russian prince Dimitri, the son of Ivan II, was assassinated on May 15, 1591, at Uglich, his place of exile, the great bell of that town rang the signal of insurrection. For this serious political offence the bell was sentenced to perpetual banishment in Siberia, and conveyed with other exiles to Tobolsk. After a long period of solitary confinement it was partially purged of its iniquity by conjuration and re-consecration and suspended in the tower of a church in the Siberian capital; but not until 1892 was it fully pardoned and restored to its original place in Uglich. A like sentence was imposed by a Russian tribunal on a butting ram in the latter half of the seventeenth century.
— E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 1906
