Tense Trouble

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Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York.

Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney.

Would you say ‘There will be an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’

Or would you say ‘There was an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’

That’s from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s It’s About Time, from 1935. For the record, the Associated Press would dateline the story SYDNEY and refer to clock times in that location.

| Language · Oddities

Discernment

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The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you’ve written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called ‘They Walk Alone.’ ‘Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if,’ it seemed to say.

— Wolcott Gibbs, “The Theatre,” New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941

| Entertainment

To the Point

In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”:

Madam,
We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on Tuesday next, the 14th inst., before 12 noon, which we trust will be convenient, after which our quotation will at once issue.

He reduces this to:

Madam,
We have your letter of May 9th requesting an estimate for the removal of your furniture and effects to Burbleton, and a man will call to see them next Tuesday forenoon if convenient, after which we will send the estimate without delay.

This shortens the letter from 66 words to 42. Then he cuts it again, to 35 words, or 157 letters against the original 294, a savings of nearly 50 percent:

Madam,
Thank you for your letter of May 9th. A man will call next Tuesday, forenoon, to see your furniture and effects, after which, without delay, we will send our estimate for their removal to Burbleton.

In a large firm, he estimates, cutting “verbose and indolent, obscure, inelegant, and time-devouring monkey-talk” could save a week’s work for two typists.

Elsewhere he considers a memo that reads “Hot-Water Bottles: With reference to the above matter I should like an opportunity of discussing same with you.” The improvement he suggests is “Could we, please, have a talk about Hot-Water Bottles?”

| Language

Pithy

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Mark Antony’s funeral oration rendered in Scrabble tiles, by Pete Stickland:

COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH!

The tiles can also spell:

QUEASY RADIOMAN WEPT: GOT TO EYE FEROCIOUS BLAZE OF VIVID AERIAL EXPLOSION, CREMATING WILTED HINDENBURG AT LAKEHURST, N.J.

| Language · Literature

Roll Call

Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s:

  • A. Noble Ladd
  • Beverage Porter
  • Bunker Hill
  • Charming Fox
  • Erie Lake
  • France Paris
  • Gunga Dean
  • Harness Upp
  • Harry Baer
  • Ima Goose
  • Jack Frost
  • Johnny Steele Casebeer
  • Liberty Bond
  • Pansy Leafe
  • Pearl Button
  • Rose Bush
  • Safety Reuel First
  • Winter Frost

Ima Foster and Ura Foster, possibly twin sisters, both received master’s degrees in education at the University of Oklahoma in 1943. “It has been suggested to me that most of the bearers of jocular names come of families in which infant baptism is not practiced, inasmuch as (it is to be hoped) few clergymen would consent to make a travesty of the sacrament of baptism by bestowing such names in christening.”

(Thomas Pyles, “Onomastic Individualism in Oklahoma,” American Speech 22:4 [December 1947], 257-264.)

08/15/2024 UPDATE: It appears Safety First became a cardiologist. “My dad gave me this troublesome title. We already had a junior in the family, so dad named me after the popular motto that had just been created.” (Thanks, Charlotte.)

| Language · Society

Shorthand

The so-called four-field approach in anthropology divides the discipline into four subfields: archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

Students call these “stones, tones, bones, and thrones.”

| Science & Math

Sharp Practice

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Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor’s, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.’ I thought this not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in shaving; — holding the razor more or less perpendicular; — drawing long or short strokes; — beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; — at the right side or the left side. Indeed, when one considers what variety of sounds can be uttered by the windpipe, in the compass of a very small aperture, we may be convinced how many degrees of difference there may be in the application of a razor.

— James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791

| Society

Stature

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Venice’s Museo Correr exhibits a pair of wooden implements whose use isn’t immediately clear — they’re chopines, a type of platform shoe popular in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Worn under a woman’s skirt they could add up to 20 inches to her height, giving her an impressive eminence but an uncertain gait. Shakespeare mocked the trend in Hamlet’s greeting to a visiting player:

“By’r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine.”

08/15/2024 UPDATE: Reader Peter Kidd notes this even more impressive pair, now at the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna:

Kidd chopines

(Thanks, Peter.)

| Oddities · Society

Cube Route

A centered hexagonal number is a number that can be represented by a hexagonal lattice with a dot in the center, like so:

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Starting at the center, successive hexagons contain 1, 7, 19, and 37 dots. The sequence goes on forever.

The sum of the first n centered hexagonal numbers is n3, and there’s a pretty “proof without words” to show that this is so:

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Instead of regarding each figure as a hexagon, think of it as a perspective view of a cube, looking down along a space diagonal. The first cube here contains a single dot. How many dots must we add to produce the next larger cube? Seven, and from our bird’s-eye perspective this pattern of 7 added dots matches the 7-dot hexagon shown above. The same thing happens when we advance to a 3×3×3 cube: This requires surrounding the 2×2×2 cube with 19 additional dots, and from our imagined vantage point these again take the form of a hexagonal lattice. In the last image our 33 cube must accrete another 37 dots to become a 43 cube … and the pattern continues.

| Science & Math

Reflections

Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson:

  • Oaths in anguish rank with prayers.
  • The wink was not our best invention.
  • When crises pall, humdrum is sensational.
  • But Woman — in whose image made?
  • A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith.
  • Forget the slush, but keep the snow / Of Christmasses of long ago.
  • Anniversary: Familiarity breeds content.
  • Some things have to be believed to be seen.
  • Who shall paraphrase a tear!
  • There’s one thing to be said for sin — it does give conscience exercise.
  • Why not Foremothers?
  • The Golden Rule was called new-fangled, once upon a time.
  • Blessed are the children of a nobody.
  • The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.

And “The ‘last word’ is only the latest.”

| Quotations