“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire
“It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey
“Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs
After the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was constantly asked to describe his adventures on that day. Eventually he insisted that all his stories had been told, but during a visit to the Marchioness of Downshire, he said, “Well, I’ll tell you one that has not been printed.”
In the middle of the battle of Waterloo he saw a man in plain clothes riding about on a cob in the thickest fire. During a temporary lull the Duke beckoned him, and he rode over. He asked him who he was, and what business he had there. He replied he was an Englishman accidentally at Brussels, that he had never seen a fight and wanted to see one. The Duke told him he was in instant danger of his life; he said ‘Not more than your Grace,’ and they parted.
But every now and then he saw the Cob-man riding about in the smoke, and at last having nobody to send to a regiment, he again beckoned to this little fellow, and told him to go up to that regiment and order them to charge, giving him some mark of authority the colonel would recognise. Away he galloped, and in a few minutes the Duke saw his order obeyed. The Duke asked him for his card, and found in the evening, when the card fell out of his sash, that he lived at Birmingham, and was a button manufacturer!
“When at Birmingham the Duke inquired of the firm and found he was their traveller and then in Ireland. When he returned, at the Duke’s request he called on him in London. The Duke was happy to see him and said he had a vacancy in the Mint of 800l. a-year, where accounts were wanted. The little Cob-man said it would be exactly the thing and the Duke installed him.”
(Attributed to John Edward Carew in The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1853.)
If you’re driving on the highway and pass a car traveling in the opposite direction, the frequency of its engine noise seems to drop. In 1980, Liverpool Polytechnic mathematician J.M.H. Peters realized that this pitch drop might be used to estimate the speed of the passing vehicle. Pleasingly, he discovered that each semitone in the interval corresponds to 21 miles per hour (to within 2 percent). If the other car’s engine seems to descend a whole tone in pitch as it passes you, then it’s traveling at approximately 43 mph; if it drops a minor third then it’s traveling at 64 mph; and so on.
“The reader should practise by humming a given note pianissimo increasing gradually to fortissimo at which point the hum is lowered by a chosen interval, … diminishing again to pianissimo, this being meant to imitate the effect of being suddenly passed on a quiet country lane by a fast moving high powered motor vehicle.”
(J.M.H. Peters, “64.8 Estimating the Speed of a Passing Vehicle,” Mathematical Gazette 64:428 [June 1980], 122-124.)
03/03/2025 UPDATE: My mistake — the observer is stationary, not moving. Thanks to readers Seth Cohen and Jon Jerome for pointing this out. The cited paper is behind a paywall, but the Physics Stack Exchange had a discussion on the same topic in 2017.
The classic, of course, is the story that tells how Mrs. Webster once accidentally walked into a room and found her husband kissing the maid. ‘Noah!’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m surprised.’ Noah, ever the verbalist, was nonplussed. ‘No, my dear,’ he corrected. ‘It is I who am surprised. You are astonished.’
— Evan Esar, Humorous English, 1961
In March 1985, Science Digest published four pangrams composed by its readers — each 26-letter sentence uses every letter in the English alphabet:
Shiv cwm lynx, fjord qutb, zap keg. (Randall Kryn) “A powerful Islamic saint (qutb) who lives in a fjord is told first to knife a troublesome lynx that lives in a mountain hollow (cwm) and then to celebrate by awesomely attacking a keg of brew.”
Schwyz fjord map vext Qung bilk. (Brian Phillips) “A cheat (bilk) from the Qung tribe in southern Africa could not understand a map of fjords in Schwyz, a canton of Switzerland.”
Fly vext bird; zag cwm’s qoph junk! (Kent Teufel) “A blimp explodes, shattering a sign in Hebrew. Pieces of qoph, the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, fall into a cwm. An annoyed, low-flying bird is told to zag in order to avoid the falling pieces.”
Qoph’s jag biz vext drunk cwm fly. (Falko Schilling) “The business of making the sharp notched edge on the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet irritated the inebriated fly from the mountain hollow.”
All the words appear in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
Last November, the National Security Agency published five pangram crosswords — in each completed grid, every letter of the alphabet must appear once.
From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I:
Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
In 2003, the Journal of Political Economy reprinted this paragraph with the title “Optimal Risk Sharing in the Trenches.”
From the Strand, May 1899:
Our next photograph is a facsimile of an address on a letter that found its way from Spain to the G.P.O., St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Remarkable as it may seem, this specimen of handwriting was deciphered by ‘the blind man of St. Martin’s,’ and the letter safely reached its destination. It is addressed to the ‘Spanish Ambassador (or Embassy), London.’
(The “blind men” were “the decipherers of illegible and imperfect addresses” in the returned letter office of the General Post Office. Further examples.)
A striking technology described in Strand, April 1899: The speck is a bundle of hay descending along a wire over a lake in Western Norway.
The Norwegians, who live for weeks and months in the summer on the great heights on either side of their beautiful valleys, send down milk, cheese, hay, etc. to the farms below by suspending them on inclined wires fastened at one end firmly to the ground and at the other to some point on the rocks above.
The snap-shot shows a bundle of hay on its way from a great height on one side of the lake to the farm on the other side. It sped along, the friction causing it to shed sparks in all directions, and was timed to take forty-four seconds.
The editors add: “If the bundle be closely examined the constriction caused by the cord holding it together is distinctly visible.”
Every positive integer can be represented uniquely as the sum of one or more distinct Fibonacci numbers in such a way that the sum does not include any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers.
Above, 51 = 34 + 13 + 3 + 1.
Discovered in 1952 by Dutch mathematician Gerrit Lekkerkerker (and remarked 20 years later by Edouard Zeckendorf).
