Shibboleths

In a 1954 essay, “The English Aristocracy,” Nancy Mitford observed that English class consciousness had permeated the language itself, so that using the wrong term betrayed a lack of breeding. She had been inspired by linguist Alan S.C. Ross, who distinguished upper-class (“U”) terms from those used by the middle class:

U	Non-U
Bike or Bicycle	Cycle
Dinner jacket	Dress suit
Knave (cards)	Jack
Vegetables	Greens
Ice	Ice cream
Scent	Perfume
They’ve a very nice house	They have (got) a lovely home
Ill (in bed)	Sick (in bed)
Looking-glass	Mirror
Chimneypiece	Mantelpiece
Graveyard	Cemetery
Spectacles	Glasses
False teeth	Dentures
Die	Pass on
Mad	Mental
Jam	Preserve
Napkin	Serviette
Sofa	Settee or couch
Lavatory or loo	Toilet
Rich	Wealthy
Good health	Cheers
Lunch	Dinner (for midday meal)
Pudding	Sweet
Drawing-room	Lounge
Writing-paper	Note-paper
What?	Pardon?
How d’you do?	Pleased to meet you
Wireless	Radio
(School)master, mistress	Teacher

Ross added, “It is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished since they are neither cleaner, richer, nor better-educated than anybody else.” Mitford said she’d written the essay “In order to demonstrate the upper middle class does not merge imperceptibly into the middle class.”

The essay touched off a vigorous national debate about English snobbery; Mitford’s essay was published in a 1956 book, Noblesse Oblige, to which John Betjeman contributed a mordant poem, “How to Get On in Society”:

Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.

It’s ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule’s comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

(Alan S.C. Ross, “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 55:1 [1954], 20-56.)

May 22, 2019May 22, 2019 | Language

Fitting

subscribers trivium

… is an 11-letter word that contains 11 curved lines and 11 straight lines.

(Discovered by Susan Thorpe.)

May 22, 2019May 21, 2019 | Trivia

A Rapid Sum

From Lewis Carroll’s diary, Feb. 5, 1856:

Varied the lesson at the school with a story, introducing a number of sums to be worked out. I also worked for them the puzzle of writing the answer to an addition sum, when only one of the five rows have been written: this … astonished them not a little.

He had started by writing an arbitrary number:

21879

Then he asked the students to call out a second five-digit number. Carroll added a third, the students shouted a fourth, and Carroll added a fifth and immediately wrote the sum:

How did he do this?

	Select Click for Answer
In writing the third and fifth numbers, he just wrote the complement of 9 for each digit in the number immediately above. When this is done, the sum can be found immediately by taking the first number, subtracting 2 from its last digit, and inserting a 2 at the front of the number.

May 21, 2019May 20, 2019 | Science & Math

Makes Sense

THREE = 03

Advance each character in that expression four steps in the alphabet or the number line and you get:

XLVII = 47

(Discovered by Dave Morice and Daniel McGrath. From “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 32:4 [November 1999], 283-293.)

May 20, 2019 | Trivia

Podcast Episode 249: The Robbers Cave Experiment

robbers cave

In 1954 a social psychologist started a war between two teams of fifth graders at an Oklahoma summer camp. He wanted to investigate the sources of human conflict and how people might overcome them. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review the Robbers Cave Experiment and examine its evolving reputation.

We’ll also dredge up a Dalek and puzzle over a hazardous job.

See full show notes …

May 20, 2019May 27, 2019 | Podcast · Science & Math · Society

Audition

In January 1942, a series of letters to the Daily Telegraph complained that the newspaper’s crossword was too easy — anyone might solve it in a matter of minutes, they said. Accordingly the chairman of a London club offered to donate £100 to charity if anyone could solve a given crossword in 12 minutes. Editor Arthur Watson arranged a competition in the paper’s Fleet Street newsroom, and five people won the competition (though the fastest was later disqualified for misspelling a word). Several were later hired to work at Bletchley Park breaking German military codes.

The Telegraph published the “time test” puzzle later that month, and presented it again in 2014, inviting readers to try to solve it in 12 minutes. “Could you have been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park?”

May 19, 2019 | Puzzles

Miniatures

Last August, researchers at Rome University produced tiny portraits of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin by modifying E. coli cells to respond to light patterns. Bacteria that received more light would swim faster, so over time they tended to concentrate in the darker parts of a negative image.

Lead author Giacomo Frangipane said in a statement, “Much like pedestrians who slow down their walking speed when they encounter a crowd, or cars that are stuck in traffic, swimming bacteria will spend more time in slower regions than in faster ones.”

Using the same technique, they created a (tiny) version of the Mona Lisa.

May 18, 2019 | Science & Math

Drawing Customers

Seoul’s Drawing Cafe is styled like a two-dimensional cartoon. Inspired by the Korean television show W, in which characters move between the real world and a fantasy world inside a webtoon, the café has designed its furniture, walls, floors, mugs, dishes, and cutlery to look like flat line drawings.

Breaking

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edmund_Hillary_and_Tenzing_Norgay.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

The ninth British expedition to Everest brought along a journalist, James Morris of the London Times. To avoid losing a scoop to other journalists who might intercept their wire messages, Morris and the editors worked out a series of code phrases with secret meanings:

Snow conditions bad: Everest climbed
Wind still troublesome: Attempt abandoned
South Col untenable: Band
Lhotse Face impossible: Bourdillon
Ridge camp untenable: Evans
Withdrawal to West Basin: Gregory
Advanced base abandoned: Hillary
Camp 5 abandoned: Hunt
Camp 6 abandoned: Lowe
Camp 7 abandoned: Noyce
Awaiting improvement: Tenzing
Further news follows: Ward

On May 30, 1953, Morris gave a seemingly innocuous message to a Sherpa runner: Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement. On June 2, on an inside page under the headline “Everest Conquered,” the Times reported that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had reached the summit on May 29. With that the Times won historic credit for breaking the story; it fell to the Daily Express to follow up with front-page coverage.

(From Paul Lunde, ed., The Book of Codes, 2009.)

May 17, 2019May 19, 2019 | History

A Fashion Puzzle

According to a British censorship manual from World War II (PDF, page 14), this sketch, published in a wartime newspaper, contained a secret message, ostensibly hidden in Morse code in the arrangement of dots and lines on the women’s dresses. The message is “Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly,” or, in the German original, “Massive Feindverstärkungen werden stündlich erwartet.”

A second message is hidden in the signature, written in a French shorthand. In English this read “Before Arras”; in German it was probably “Vor Arras.”

Unfortunately, the manual doesn’t explain the method by which these messages were hidden, and to date no one has been able to re-establish it. Where are these messages to be found in the image? Encryption expert Klaus Schmeh writes, “So far, I could neither find the morse message nor the shorthand message. I even went to the British Archive in London to look at the original document and to take high resolution photographs. It didn’t help.”

On his blog, Schmeh presents one of these high-resolution images, as well as a second mystery from the same manual. See the comments on that post for some suggestions from his readers.

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 | History