cimicine
adj. smelling of insects
hircinous
adj. smelling like a goat
suaveolent
adj. smelling sweet
alliaceous
adj. smelling like garlic or onions
puant
adj. stinking
macrosmatic
adj. having a well-developed sense of smell
Safe Tears
Why do we enjoy sad fiction? In 2009 Boston College psychologist Thalia Goldstein asked 59 subjects to rate the sadness and anxiety they felt in response to four film clips (two presented as fictional, two as factual) and to their own memory of a sad event they’d experienced personally. While they reported equivalent levels of sadness in response to all these things, their anxiety level was significantly higher when recalling their own experience.
“Apparently we do not mind experiencing intense sadness if that sadness is not tinged with anxiety,” Goldstein writes. Indeed, that might make it more cathartic. And because we know that we can walk away from a fictional sadness, we may feel safer suspending our disbelief to explore and understand our feelings deeply.
(Thalia R. Goldstein, “The Pleasure of Unadulterated Sadness: Experiencing Sorrow in Fiction, Nonfiction, and in Person,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3:4 [2009], 232.)
Misc
- Mr. Peanut’s full name is Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe.
- Michael J. Fox is 10 days younger than Lea Thompson and 3 years older than Crispin Glover.
- Nebraska’s state slogan is “Honestly, it’s not for everyone.”
- Eight-letter words typed with eight fingers: BIPLANES, CAPTIONS, ELAPSING, JACKPOTS, LIFESPAN, PANELIST.
- “Memory can restore to life everything except smells.” — Nabokov
Unquote
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” — Mario Andretti
Podcast Episode 267: The Murchison Murders
In 1929, detective novelist Arthur Upfield wanted to devise the perfect murder, so he started a discussion among his friends in Western Australia. He was pleased with their solution — until local workers began disappearing, as if the book were coming true. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the Murchison murders, a disturbing case of life imitating art.
We’ll also incite a revolution and puzzle over a perplexing purchase.
For Short
Dr. Dobbin, lecturing on physical education in Hull, England, condemned the practice of tight-lacing as injurious to the health and symmetry of the female sex, and jocularly proposed the formation of an ‘Anti-killing-young-women-by-a-lingering-death Society.’
This was gravely reproduced in other parts of England and on the Continent as a sober matter of fact, the Germans giving the hyphenated title thus: Jungefrauenzimmerdurchschwindsuchttodtungsgegenverein.
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, The Book of Blunders, 1871
The Speech-to-Song Illusion
In 1995 UCSD psychologist Diana Deutsch was fine-tuning the spoken commentary on a CD when she noticed something odd. When the phrase “sometimes behave so strangely” was repeated on a loop, it came to sound as though it were being sung rather than spoken. When the full surrounding passage was then played in its entirety, this phrase still sounded as though it were being sung (you can hear this here).
The phenomenon is not completely understood, but “the present experiments show that for a phrase to be heard as spoken or as sung, it does not need to have a set of physical properties that are unique to speech, or a different set of physical properties that are unique to song,” the researchers write. “Rather, we must conclude that, assuming the neural circuitries underlying speech and song are at some point distinct and separate, they can accept the same input, but process the information in different ways so as to produce different outputs.”
(Via MetaFilter.)
Endless Learning
Visitors to the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest are greeted by a perpetual book with leaves of water.
See Stairs of Knowledge.
Buzz Off
The first directory of Philadelphia, published in 1785, contains some odd entries:
‘I won’t tell you,’ 3. Maiden’s Lane.
‘I won’t tell it,’ 15. Sugar Alley.
‘I won’t tell you my name,’ 160. New Market Street.
‘I won’t have it numbered,’ 478. Green Street.
‘I won’t tell my name,’ 185. St. John’s Street.
‘I shall not give you my name,’ 43. Stamper’s Alley.
‘What you please,’ 49. Market Street.
Apparently some residents, suspicious of taxation, had refused to identify themselves … so the publishers listed their responses in place of their names in the directory.
(From Notes and Queries.)
Pressure
In January 1946, the night before he was to scheduled fly to Tokyo, British air marshal Victor Goddard attended a cocktail party in Shanghai where another officer described a dream in which Goddard had been killed in a plane crash. He said the plane had been carrying three English civilian passengers, two men and a woman, and had experienced icing troubles during the flight and crashed on a shingled beach near mountains.
Goddard’s flight had had no scheduled passengers, but that night he was asked successively to take two men and a woman with him to Tokyo, all English civilians. During the flight the plane’s wings iced over and he was forced to make a crash landing on the Japanese island of Sado, on a shingled beach near mountains. Everyone survived, and they were rescued after a search.
“For my next crash I want no prior information,” Goddard wrote in the Saturday Evening Post. “Makes one too ‘nervy,’ as we say. Quite spoils the enjoyment of flying.”