Summation
In his Notebooks, Samuel Butler tells a story of Herbert Clarke’s 10-year-old son:
His mother had put him to bed and, as he was supposed to have a cold, he was to say his prayers in bed. He said them, yawned and said, ‘The real question is whether there is a God or no,’ on which he instantly fell into a sweet and profound sleep which forbade all further discussion.
Elsewhere Butler wrote, “What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, ‘I bet that my Redeemer liveth.'”
Mailbag
To the Editor of the Herald:
I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice versa. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on the centigrade thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit’s thermometer.
Old Philadelphia Lady
Paris, December 24, 1899
That’s reasonable enough, right? It ran in the Paris Herald on Dec. 27, 1899.
The curious thing is that it also ran on Dec. 28, and Dec. 29 … and every day thereafter for 18 years, a total of 6,718 times.
Publisher James Gordon Bennett never gave a reason — he only told colleague James B. Townsend that “just so long as there was an average income of jocose but more often indignant and abusive letters about this letter at the Paris Herald office he would continue to publish it.”
Caught!
When Eisenhower took office in 1953, a group of conservative Republicans claimed that the outgoing Democrats had been stealing gold deposits from Fort Knox.
Bowing to pressure from the Daughters of the American Revolution, Eisenhower had the gold counted. Sure enough, it came up ten bucks short: The depository contained only $30,442,415,581.70.
Truman’s treasurer, Georgia Clark, rolled her eyes and sent a check to cover the shortfall.
Diplomacy
“Mr. Speaker, I said the honorable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honorable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.”
— Richard Brinsley Sheridan, when asked to apologize to another member of Parliament
Unquote
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” — E.B. White
Spirolaterals
Imagine you have a little robot that holds a pencil. Set it down on a sheet of paper and give it these instructions:
- Move forward 3 units and turn right.
- Move forward 1 unit and turn right.
- Move forward 2 units and turn left.
- Move forward 1 unit and turn left.
- Move forward 2 units and turn right.
- Repeat.
If the robot makes its turns at 90° angles, it will produce this figure:
But, remarkably, if it turns at 120° it will draw this:
“The Story of Esaw Wood”
Esaw Wood sawed wood.
Esaw Wood would saw wood!
All the wood Esaw Wood saw Esaw Wood would saw. In other words, all the wood Esaw saw to saw Esaw sought to saw.
Oh, the wood Wood would saw! And oh, the wood-saw with which Wood would saw wood.
But one day Wood’s wood-saw would saw no wood, and thus the wood Wood sawed was not the wood Wood would saw if Wood’s wood-saw would saw wood.
Now, Wood would saw wood with a wood-saw that would saw wood, so Esaw sought a saw that would saw wood.
One day Esaw saw a saw saw wood as no other wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood.
In fact, of all the wood-saws Wood ever saw saw wood Wood never saw a wood-saw that would saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood would saw wood, and I never saw a wood-saw that would saw as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw until I saw Esaw Wood saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.
Now Wood saws wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.
Oh, the wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw!
Oh, the wood Wood’s woodshed would shed when Wood would saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood!
Finally, no man may ever know how much wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw, if the wood-saw Wood saw would saw all the wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw.
— W.E. Southwick
Anthologist Carolyn Wells writes, “Well, you don’t have to read it.”
Out, Damned Tot!
George Blonsky’s “Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force,” patented in 1965, is pretty well self-explanatory. The modern woman lacks the muscle tone to deliver a baby easily, so we put her on a giant turntable and let G forces do the work. A glimpse through the patent abstract gives the general idea: “stretcher … handgrip … girdle … ballast … speed … forces … net … bell … handbrake … stretcher.”
A note for expectant mothers — William Potts Dewees’ 1858 Treatise on the Physical and Medical Treatment of Children includes this advice on “the treatment of the nipples”:
[T]he patient should begin to prepare these parts previously to labor, by the application of a young, but sufficiently strong puppy to the breast; this should be immediately after the seventh month of pregnancy. By this plan the nipples become familiar to the drawing of the breasts; the skin of them becomes hardened and confirmed; the milk is more easily and regularly formed; and a destructive accumulation and inflammation is prevented.
I don’t know whether Dewees actually tried this … but it seems likely he did, doesn’t it?
No, No, No
The New York Times ran a bewildering headline on May 6, 1965:
“Albany Kills Bill to Repeal Law Against Birth Control”
… a triple (quadruple?) negative.
“As you leave the town of Franklin, Pennsylvania, you encounter a sign: END BRAKE RETARDER PROHIBITION,” notes Edward Wolpow in the May 2011 issue of Word Ways. “For those for whom this is relevant, they are, presumably, able to follow the instructions quite quickly, since it is, after all, a road sign. But I still can’t figure it.”
In a 1975 interview with Business Week, Henry Kissinger said, “I am not saying that there’s no circumstances where we would not use force” against Saudi Arabia. Is this what he meant to say?
At a New York conference of linguistic philosophers in the 1950s, Oxford professor J.L. Austin noted that while a double negative often expresses a positive — as in “not unattractive” — there is no example in English of a double positive expressing a negative.
Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who was in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah …”