Readers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford must take an oath that they will not kindle fires in the library.
Shhhh!
Two by Two
BOOKKEEPER has three consecutive pairs of like letters. SUBBOOKKEEPER has four.
What’s the limit? Honolulu English teacher Joel D. Gaines proposed BALLOONNOONNOOKKEEPPOOBAH, “an agent who sits on balloons at noon in a corner, in order to earn his keep.” It has 10 consecutive pairs.
Overheard
Thackeray was at a St. Louis dinner, when one waiter said to another: ‘That is the celebrated Mr. Thackeray.’ ‘What’s he done?’ said the other. ‘Blessed if I know,’ was the answer.
— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879
A More Perfect Union
In 1836 James Daniel Royster began a curious family tradition — he named all his children after states.
He named his sons Iowa Michigan Royster, Arkansas Delaware Royster, Wisconsin Illinois Royster, Vermont Connecticut Royster, and Oregon Minnesota Royster.
The daughters were named Virginia Carolina Royster and Indiana Georgia Royster.
The practice came to a wider knowledge a century later — Royster’s great-grandson, Vermont Connecticut Royster, won two Pulitzer Prizes as editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Cut and Thrust
University of Toronto math professor Ed Barbeau can take a rectangular piece of paper and, using only a pair of scissors, produce the object pictured above. How?
“Constantly Mean”
The golden mean is quite absurd;
It’s not your ordinary surd.
If you invert it (this is fun!),
You’ll get itself, reduced by one;
But if increased by unity,
This yields its square, take it from me.
— Paul S. Bruckman, The Fibonacci Quarterly, 1977
Pink Labels
In gathering material for The American Language, H.L. Mencken collected unusual girls’ names from printed sources in the 1930s and 1940s, mainly in the Southwest. “The following, though some of them may seem almost impossible, are all typical”:
- Apple
- Armadilla
- Arthurene
- Australia
- Beatfred
- Begonia
- Birdeen
- Cementa
- Chlorine
- Covadonga
- Coweene
- Elicious
- Faucette
- Garguerite
- Gazelle
- Glary Ann
- Glenoulia
- Halloween
- Hygiene
- Hughzetta
- Kiwanis
- Larceny
- Leafy Ella
- Locust
- O’Dwaine
- Pencilla
- Pleasantina
- Scharlott
- Townzella
- Ukdene
- Vasoline
- Wroberta
- Wyneese
- Zelvateen
Of the stranger specimens, Mencken says, “It is as if the ambitious mother of a newly-hatched darling wrote all the elements of all the ancient girls’ names upon slips of paper, added slips bearing syllables filched from the terminology of all the arts and sciences, heaved the whole into an electric salad-tosser, and then arranged the seethed contents two by two or three by three.”
In a Word
sectile
adj. capable of being cut easily with a knife
First Impressions
In 1984, grad student Deborah Linville asked students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to rate the perceived sexiness of 250 female names. Sexiest (on a scale of 1 to 7) were Christine (5.08), Candace (4.92), Cheryl (4.91), Melanie (4.91), Dawn (4.83), Heather (4.83), Jennifer (4.83), Marilyn (4.83), Michelle (4.83), and Susan (4.83). Least sexy were Ethel (1.00), Alma (1.08), Zelda (1.16), Florence (1.5), Mildred (1.5), Myrtle (1.5), Silvana (1.5), Edna (1.66), Eurolinda (1.66), and Elvira (1.69).
Then Linville asked another group of students to play boss and rate the job applications of eight equally qualified women — submitted under particularly sexy and unsexy names.
Men hired and promoted non-sexy applicants much more frequently than women did. Linville concluded that “there is a prejudice toward women applicants based on the degree of sexiness of their names,” perhaps because men particularly expect female managers to possess strengths, such as motivation and decisiveness, that they don’t associate with sexy-sounding names.
The Popgun War
Brothers Alphonse, Kenneth, and Mayo Prud’homme were playing with a foot-long toy cannon in Natchitoches, La., in September 1941 when they saw a man peering at them through binoculars from the opposite side of the Cane River. “We just fired a shot at him to see what would happen,” Kenneth remembered later. “He bailed out of the tree and went flying back down the road in a cloud of dust.”
Presently the man returned with infantry. “They started shooting back at us, and when they’d shoot, we’d shoot back.”
This went on for half an hour, escalating gradually. The boys’ father added firecrackers to their arsenal; their opponents set up smoke screens and readied a .155 howitzer. At last an Army officer appeared at their side and said, “Mr. Prud’homme, do you mind calling off your boys? You’re holding up our war.”
The boys, ages 14, 12, and 9, had interrupted war games involving 400,000 troops spread over 3,400 square miles in preparation for America’s entry into World War II. At the sound of the cannon, George S. Patton had stopped his Blue convoy and engaged what he thought was the opposing Red army. His men were firing blanks, but the maneuvers were real.
“That’s my one claim to fame,” Kenneth told an Army magazine writer in 2009. “I defeated General Patton.”